HD space mysteriously gone

My external HD has a 60G capacity. Disk Usage Analyser says I've only used 17G of it. Which is logical, since my estimates points to that amount as well. But, gparted says I've already used 48G. And everything is in one 60G partiton. So... Where did the other 31G go to?

 

gparted only shows the space available to repartition. That's a side-effect of fragmentation. If you mount the drive and use df, you should see only 17GB used. Basically, you have some files/fragments near the middle/end of the drive, so it can't shrink the filesystem smaller than that.

 

I guess a format is in order, then. I'd really love to format it in ext3, but I'm just afraid that other Windows systems can't read it. *sigh*

 

format? Why not just run a deframenter?

 

Eh! Ahh! Me and my silly thinking. What's a good Linux defragger? Or should I just boot to Windows for it?

 

Isn't ext3 supposed to defragment itself? Making manual defragmenting useless?

 

My external is formatted in NTFS, because I need it so that all systems can access it.

And why does Windows come up with a filesystem that fragments anyway? That's so stupid.

 

probably since in the past they used it to save on system resources. Now though, people have lots of extra power so they should be migrating to something new soon... i *think* (well, within the next 10 years )

but, just use the defragger built into windows, its easier than tracking down a defragger for linux then hoping it will work.

 

Oh, ****ter. Here's what the gparted LiveCD had to say:
"WARNING: The disk has a bad sector..... physical damage.... degrade fast...." :cry:

This was my favourite external HD! :cry: It said something about using ntfsclone and ntfsrescue, but yaourt doesn't have these programs.

 

btw you can format your external to ext3

google "windows ext3" and hit i'm feeling lucky, that program will read/write ext3 on windows. i do this (as well as several people i know) because we dont like ntfs and store everything in ext3- except for games but thats not really important so

@ayle: ext3 doesnt defrag itself, it is just written in a much more efficient way such that fragmentation does not occur until your harddrive is something like 95% full

 

I know that program. Sadly, the problem is more serious. 2 days ago I found out the disk had physical damage, so I might as well, and bought myself a new external.