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Re: Harddisk sectors & partitioning
Peter_22@xxxxxx wrote:
> My harddisk has 390,716,865 sectors.
> I installed it into the PC and partitioned it as part of the setup of SuSE
> Linux 8.2 a while ago. Fine so far. What wonders me is the fact that only
> 390,684,734 sectors are used. So 32,131 sectors, which equals
> 16,451,072 bytes or 15.68 MB, are left free. But for what?
> Is there a good reason why this space is left blank? Otherwise, can I erase
> these sectors or set up a loop device on it? I have no idea what these
> spare-sectors serve for.
Long time ago, disks used cylinder/head/sector access to data. All modern
disks are addressed using logical block numbers. MS-DOS style partition
tables still use some fake cylinder/head/sector info for partitions. Usually
disk partitioning software creates partitions on full cylinder boundary.
Depending on that fake cylinder/head/sector setting, minimum disk space
allocation unit may be many megabytes. That may leave some partial fake
cylinders unused.
IOW, blame your disk partitioning software.
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Jari Ruusu 1024R/3A220F51 5B 4B F9 BB D3 3F 52 E9 DB 1D EB E3 24 0E A9 DD
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