new hard drive, missing 46GB

[Kadafi]

Ive just added a new WD 1TB hard drive, i want to format it to jfs, but Gparted wont let me, so for the mean time ive had to format it to ext3. once this was done there was a folder in the drive called lost+found, which I had to delete manually using root commands, I then had to set the permissions in the same fashion. theres nothing on the drive, yet when you check the properties it says 46.8Gb used and 870.1Gb free. there are no hidden files but something is taking up 46.8Gb of space. any ideas?

 

[The Mad Rapper]

Sorry if this is a silly question, but can your motherboard BIOS address a drive of that size?

 

[Kadafi]

no idea, how can i check?

 

[The Mad Rapper]

no idea, how can i check?

Have a look on the motherboard and it should have a manufacturer's detail and a version code. Then go to the manufacturers web site and d/l the PDF for that board and read about what it will support. If you have had the board for a while then it may be necessary to flash the BIOS to support larger capacity drives. If there is a BIOS update available, then it's usually a simple matter to d/l that and update the BIOS.

If you can't see a manufacturers ID on the board, then install SiSoft SANDRA, as this may be able to tell you.

 

[The Mad Rapper]

Another thought I have just had was that you said you wanted to format the drive. Was it already partitioned? If so, does that partition support the file system type you were trying to format the disk with?

You could try re-partitioning the drive and see if that helps?

 

[Kadafi]

re-partitioning doesnt make any difference, im gona investigate the motherboard will see what it turns up.

EDIT

As far as i can tell, ive got the latest bios for my chipset. but i cant find anywhere that says theres a limit for a storage device.

 

[eXor]

The disk is fine. This is a "feature" of ext3.

By default, it reserves five percent for root to keep the system from failing if space runs out.

 

[Kadafi]

ahh, thanks for the response. 5% of 1tb is 46gb which I think is a bit excessive.

 

[BigglesPiP]

You can change the ratios, at the moment it's set safe for lots of small files.

 

[Kadafi]

how would i go about changing the ratio?

 

[BigglesPiP]

how would i go about changing the ratio?

Wait until you need an extra 20GB or so.

 

[BillytheImpaler]

Any idea why you couldn't format it to JFS? Did you try using XFS instead?

Why did you choose JFS over other compatible file systems?

 

[Kadafi]

I still cant format it to JFS or XFS, I did the hard drive out and popped it into a windows pc to use partition manager and that let me format to JFS but when moving it back to the linux box i got tons of permissions errors so just thought I might as well put it back to ext3.

I wanted to use xfs or jfs for the simple fact of improved performance, the drive is going to be sharing a multitude of data to a variety of sources.

 

[deano]

do you get any errors back when trying to format the drive from the command line, any errors in messages or syslog when using gparted?