Reclaiming "hidden" capacity on outboard USB hard drive

[Peter N. Spotts]

Folks,

Over the past month and a half or so, I've gotten helpful advice on
ensuring that my Ubuntu installation (now 6.06) reads from and writes to
my outboard USB drive (Maxtor 300gb). I'm looking to close the book on
the troubles I had by reclaiming what appears to be "missing" capacity. 

To briefly recap: I had been using the drive as a backup. During the
switch from another distro to Ubuntu, I lost the ability to read to and
write to the drive, so I was advised to treat it like a new drive,
formatting it in ext3, setting up new partitions, etc. Ultimately, that
got me back in business. However...

1. Fdisk -l shows 300 gb of gross capacity.
2. Gkrellm shows 295 gb total and 274 free (meaning at least 21 gb
used, depending on whether you like Fdisk or Gkrellm statistics).
3. duh -h shows that the files it can detect on the drive are using
only 6 gb of space. 

So it appears that I've got gobs of gigs missing. Is it possible to
reclaim them? Or are they destined to spin furiously forever like some
forlorn tourists on a renegade ride at Diskneyland?

Best,

Pete

-- 
Peter N. Spotts | Science reporter
The Christian Science Monitor
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