Reclaiming "hidden" capacity on outboard USB hard drive

[Mark Warner]

Peter N. Spotts wrote:
> 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?

Which is closer to what you're expecting, 6G used or 21/26G used?

What does gparted say?

As for the 300/295G reporting discrepancy, don't worry about it. Very
common, especially with large drives. It's just the way it is.