Where did all my HDD space go?

English Hardware
1

Hello,

I decided the time has come to ditch Windoze entirely. So I formatted all my hard drives using ext2 and ext3. According to the partitioner 1/3 of all the space is used leaving 2/3 to work with. There is nothing on these drives, they’ve just been formatted. What could be taking up all the space? I used ext2 on the partitions that will be used for real-time video capture and live recording in my music studio, and ext3 on everything else (editing, ripping a large CD collection to FLAC and OGG, etc} where journaling is desireable. Would I be better off using FAT32 and/or NTFS? They do’t seem to hav the capacity loss from what i observed.

Thanks,

Zuvuya

2

Are you sure it is 1/3 ?

When formating it is normal for the partitioner to “reserve” 5% of the partition in case the disk gets full but you can always override this easily with

tunefs -m0 /dev/sd(x)

3

BenderBendingRodriguez wrote:
> Are you sure it is 1/3 ?
>
> When formating it is normal for the partitioner to “reserve” 5% of the
> partition in case the disk gets full but you can always override this
> easily with
>
> tunefs -m0 /dev/sd(x)

Be a little careful with this. The space is reserved for root so that
you can still boot even if the partition is “full” for a
non-privileged user. If you release all of this, your system could be
unbootable.

4

>tunefs -m0 /dev/sd(x)

Be a little careful with this. The space is reserved for root so that
you can still boot even if the partition is “full” for a
non-privileged user. If you release all of this, your system could be
unbootable.

Yes, I agree. I would rather be in a position of being at least able to boot, and delete a few unrequired files, and get back a working environment, than be up $*it creek without a paddle…

5

We weren’t talking about root partition were we;)??

6

Maybe we could concentrate on the OPs problem I think he would love that ;).

Post the output of

fdisk -l

so we can see what the sizes of the partitions are.
And the output of

df

so we can see what the sizes of the file systems are.

(And please, place CODE tags around the answers so that columns are preserved).

7

Sorry it took so long to get back but I was reformatting and re-installing everything. The original formatting was done with Paragon Partition Manager. I don’t know why the HDD space loss was incurred, but I re-formatted using Parted Magic (highly recommended GNU setup disk) and the HDD space was normal after formatting.

Thanks for the help.

Zuvuya

8

Nice you sorted it out.

BTW, there is no need for all these partition utilities when you decided to install openSUSE on your disk, removing everything else. Just tell the installer that you want to use the whole disk for SUSE, check and adjust what the installer proposes and off you go!