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. -- Jari Ruusu 1024R/3A220F51 5B 4B F9 BB D3 3F 52 E9 DB 1D EB E3 24 0E A9 DD - Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/
