[SOLVED] 6 GB used in empty, newly formatted hard drive

I just reformatted an external USB hard drive. It was a FAT32 partition. I just reformatted it to be on large (110 GB) ext3 filesystem using gparted. The reformatting went smoothly, but I'm wondering why when I check the properties on the drive, it reports that 5.8 GB are used.

I understand there is undoubtedly some system related stuff written to the disk that I don't see in the filesystem, but 5.8 GB? Is this normal?

Is this related to the fact that I made the whole thing one large partition instead of several smaller partitions?

Is the partition primary or logical?

Hi. By default, ext2 and ext3 reserves 5% of the total disk space for some reason.
You can turn it off by executing:
# sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/<yourdevicehere>
For instance
# sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sda3

Hope this helps. :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hallgeirl

Hi. By default, ext2 and ext3 reserves 5% of the total disk space for some reason.

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The reason is to keep the system running when the disk is getting full. Only root (the superuser) can use the last 5%.

Suppose that the disk was really 100% full, then even root might not be able to login anymore to cleanup things.

If this is a second disk (not the main harddisk that contains your Ubuntu OS installation) then it's no problem to change the settings so that you can use the last 5%. I wouldn't do that on your main harddisk, it might make the system unusable if the disk is full.

Cheers for the explanation. :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hermes0710

Is the partition primary or logical?

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I believe it is a primary partition, if I understand the difference correctly. It is not the partition I boot from, though. It's an external hard drive connected through a USB port. I formatted the entire external drive as one ext3 partition.

It looks like I'm getting the answer I was looking for from the other posts, though, so I understand what's going on.

Thanks jespdj and hallgeirl for the info.