My Writings. My Thoughts.

EXT3 and reserved space for Super User

// March 31st, 2009 // Linux, Troublesolving, Ubuntu

Now that is what I call a stellar title for a blog post! If you instantly get that, you have probably been fiddling with Linux for a while.

Well then, let the me explain myself. This is mostly a note to self so I know what to do the next time I run into this. I just installed a new 1TB disk for my Linux (Ubuntu) server. I partitioned it, and executed a simple:

mke2fs /dev/sdd1

I then went ahead and mounted the new file system, and checked the available space. I was a bit disappointed to see that my 1TB drive only had 871GB available space! OK, this is quite a lot of space but I was not at all satisfied with that. After chatting away awhile with my buddy mr Google I realized that the EXT3 format reserves 5% of the partition for the super user. Supposedly this is to be used in case of emergency, but this drive was used to be used as a simple file storage backup drive. To remove/change the amount of the reserved space, you just issue the following commands. Please be advised that you should NEVER do this on a system partition!

First, unmount the partition if it is mounted

sudo umount /dev/hdb1

Then issued this command to decrease the reserved space to 0:

sudo tune2fs -r 0 /dev/hdb1

And then just mount the partition again

sudo mount /dev/hdb1

And that’s all there is to it. Afterwards I had 917GB of available space. That’s more like it.

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