[SOLVED] gparted did not erase data from hdd

[Cobbs]

I'm trying to mount a HDD that used to run my OS, since I decided to use a smaller drive. I used gparted to create a ext3 HDD, yet I am seeing a 7.6GB use of the drive... I assumed that the gparted would have cleaned up and files that were floating around on the HDD when it formatted it, I can't find what it using the space (tried a sudo nautilus to make sure there weren't hidden files).

Any suggestions or ideas why this happened?

Cheers

Cobbs

[taurus]

What's the output of this command from a terminal?

df -h

You can also format a new harddrive/partition from a terminal too.

[Cobbs]

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 71G 8.8G 58G 14% /
tmpfs 1013M 0 1013M 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 1013M 300K 1012M 1% /var/run
varlock 1013M 0 1013M 0% /var/lock
udev 1013M 2.8M 1010M 1% /dev
tmpfs 1013M 784K 1012M 1% /dev/shm
lrm 1013M 2.0M 1011M 1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/volatile
/dev/sdb1 147G 188M 140G 1% /media/disk

[taurus]

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 71G 8.8G 58G 14% /
tmpfs 1013M 0 1013M 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 1013M 300K 1012M 1% /var/run
varlock 1013M 0 1013M 0% /var/lock
udev 1013M 2.8M 1010M 1% /dev
tmpfs 1013M 784K 1012M 1% /dev/shm
lrm 1013M 2.0M 1011M 1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/volatile
/dev/sdb1 147G 188M 140G 1% /media/disk

Are we talking about /dev/sdb1 here? The thing is empty. The reason you see 7.6GB of space used with gparted is perhaps due to 5% reserved for ext3 filesystem.

[Cobbs]

Yes, the /dev/sdb1 is the drive in question, is it best to stay with the ext3 partition or go with something else? I can live with the 5% if need be, I was just wondering if there were leftovers from the old drive that were taking up space.

[taurus]

It's best to stick with ext3 filesystem and once you format it, there is nothing left from previous system. However, you can set the reserved space to 0% if you wish but since you have a large partition/drive, 147GB, I wouldn't worry too much about that 5%.

[Cobbs]

Ok, excellent, thanks taurus!

[prshah]

is it best to stay with the ext3 partition or go with something else? I can live with the 5% if need be,

ext3 is the best option.

That 5% is reserved for root operations when the drive gets full. Typically (for example in Windows) when the drive gets full, you cannot get in even to delete files to create space. To avoid such a situation, ext3 reserves 5% space for usage of root alone. When your harddisk gets full, it's actually 95% full, and critical system processes running as root will continue to function even so. You can also get it as root and delete files to create space.