Hi there,
Just got given an redundant machine with a small hard drive so I thought I'd use it to test some flavours of linux. Wiped the HD clean and the plan was to create three partitions. The distro partition, a swap and a FAT32. Now, I created a 6Gb ext3 linux partition ( using gparted on a liveCD). Once the partitions had been created I noticed that 243Mb of the ext3 partition was used. This went down to 139Mb when I went into an xterm , mounted the ext3 partition and issued the command df -h . What is such a significant amount of HD space being used for ? The partition is not mounted nor any OS installed yet 243 Mb (4 %)is being used for something. Could I ask what this could be used for or is there some sort of problem with my HD.

Thanks again !

Uncle

Ext3 researves about 3% space for root use (which I beleive includes the ext3 journal). There is a way to reduce the size to 1% but I don't remember how at the moment.

The default reserved space is 5%. This is to allow root to login in case the filesysem becomes full and to reduce fragementation. You can use tune2fs to reduce this amount.