Martin Ankerl » trick http://martin.ankerl.com No movement is faster than no movement Tue, 13 Jul 2010 05:31:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc Get More Space Out of Your ext3 Partition http://martin.ankerl.com/2008/01/12/get-more-space-out-of-your-ext3-partition/ http://martin.ankerl.com/2008/01/12/get-more-space-out-of-your-ext3-partition/#comments Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:56:24 +0000 Martin Ankerl http://martin.ankerl.com/?p=104 I have just discovered that ext3 defaults to reserving 5% of its partition exclusively for root, as a precaution measure that your system does not get FUBAR when you use it for your root partition. I have a 230GB external USB disk that I use for all my big storage requirements, downloaded stuff, backups etc. Due to this reservation I had 11.5GB of unusable disk space, thankfully this is easy to fix:

tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdf1

Replace sdf1 with your partition name. You don’t even have to unmount your disk. Voilá, 11.5 GB more space for free :-) Here is the output of df -h as proof:

Before:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdf1             230G  193G   26G  89% /media/disk

After:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdf1             230G  193G   38G  84% /media/disk

If you like this, you might also be interested in How to change Ubuntu forced fsck.

Update: The free space limitation is also used to prevent fragmentation. So if you set the limit to zero and operate on a very full harddisk for a while, your filesystem might slow down.

]]> http://martin.ankerl.com/2008/01/12/get-more-space-out-of-your-ext3-partition/feed/ 10