I formated a 40 gig hardrive and if I check how much usable room there is it show only 34 gigs...Anyone have any ideas on how to reclaim a few of those lost gigs or why it would format so small.

You are going to have to give us more info to help you.

Is this on a Linux or UNIX system?
What is the Operating System and version?
What disk tools do you have Veritas (SUN, HPUX), LVM Manager (HPUX), or some other one?
Have you configured any other large disks on your system?

Any other info would help a lot.

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linux redhat 7.1
e2fsck -v to format
drive seagate 40 gig hardrive.
and i am using the applet to view how much usable disk there is

run fdisk, use p to print out current partition layout, then post it out, maybe I can give u some advice.

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hdb: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 77545 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 77545 39082648+ 83 Linux


so whats it all mean

Hi

Well, take a look at the cylinders.
u have 77545 cylinders and each cylinder
is of size (1008 * 512) = 516096 bytes,
hence, 516096*77545 = 40,020,664,320 bytes

so there is your 40 GB.

/*ghost*/

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