At 16:17 4/21/2004, you wrote:
Creating the partition with fdisk seems to have improved things. The df utility now reports 1.8T for the partition, the 0.2T being used up in overhead. That's more like it!
200GB in overhead? That's about 10%. Why so high?
Root normally reserves space on a partition to prevent the disk filling up totally and crashing the system, but that's normally just 5%, so where's the other 5% (100GB) going? You can check how much space is "reserved" for root with:
# tune2fs -m /dev/hda1
You can also adjust it to 2% instead of 5% (since your filesystem is so large) via:
# tune2fs -m 2 /dev/hda1
See the man page for more details or if I've made any mistakes.
Inodes also take up space. If you have 2048 GB raw partition, and want one inode every 32K, and eack inode takes up one 1K-block, you have 32 inodes/MB * 1024 MB/GB * 2048 GB ==> 67108864 Kbytes = 65536 MB = 64 GB used up just by your inodes.
Also, the ext3 journal takes up some space, but it shouldn't be too much.
So, all in all, the 200 GB number sounds about right to me.
