[plug] Dude, where is my HD space gone?

[James Devenish]

In message <6.0.3.0.1.20040701174728.01da3ec0 at mail.westnet.com.au>
on Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 06:02:13PM +0800, Aesop Beetlebum wrote:
> 	Bit of a query to the community regarding a certain phenomenon I am 
> witnessing regarding a 120GB HD, which formats as ext3 to 111GB useable 
> space and is 100% full at 105GB...

111GB * 95% = 105MB

Basically, I suspect that 5% of your hard drive space has been reserved
for the 'root' user. This enables you to come in and fix things up even
if non-root users have accidently caused the drive to "run out" of disk
space entirely. So, it's your built-in safety margin. Here is an excerpt
from the mke2fs manual:

    -m reserved-blocks-percentage
          Specify the percentage of the filesystem blocks reserved
          for the super-user.  This value defaults to 5%.