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40gb Hard disk issue

  Date: Dec 04    Category: Unix / Linux / Ubuntu    Views: 378
  

I have a harddisk of 40 gb. But when i go to partition editor in ubuntu. I shows
that my main partition is 35.69 gb, and linux swap partition is 1.59 gb. I was
wondering where is the rest of the space to make 40 gb in total?
Apologies for asking this silly question. But, I was curious about it. Hope to
hear from you soon.

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3 Answers Found

 
Answer #1    Answered On: Dec 04    

Some drive manufacturers use a decimal billion (1,000,000,000) bytes as
a gigabyte, others use the 'binary billion' of 2^30 (1,073,741,824)
bytes as a gigabyte. Iomega is the one that springs most readily to
mind as using the decimal billion. However, so far as I am aware, all
operating systems use the binary billion which means that drives using
the decimal billion are shown with a lower space than that printed on
the box.

Also, all OSs retain a small proportion of the drive as free space which
you cannot use. Without this, if you filled the entire drive, disk
operations would grind to a halt and you would find it very hard to free
up any space to make the disk usable again.

I would guess that it is the first factor that is at work here as the
binary equivalent of a 40 (decimal) GB drive is 37.25 (binary) GB - very
close to the total space you are reporting. The reserved space is (I
think) usually around 5% of the total, or about 2GB, which would make
your reported space a little too low.

 
Answer #2    Answered On: Dec 04    

Where did you got this idea from? It's completely not true.

 
Answer #3    Answered On: Dec 04    

man mke2fs

http://www.fdlinux.com/mke2fshowto.html#Overview

man tune2fs

www.neowin.net/.../623460-using-tune2fs-to-maintain-disks-and-fre\
e-up-space/

While the above is Linux specific, it is my understanding that other
operating systems do pretty much the same thing.

 
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