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Get rid of hidden Linux HDD Partitions?


Madfish

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After installing and reformatting an old HDD, I noticed that the total drive size in Gb did not match the actual size (50Gb difference). Apparently formatting the drive did not erase an old linux partition. It is not visible from windows drive manager or chkdisk.

Is there a way to do a low level format and erase the old partitions? I am out of ideas.

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What size hard drive is on the label? Cause you lose quite a lot of space just with the difference in base 10 vs base 2. Thus 1TB (on label, using base10) drives are 931GB when formatted and in OS (using base2).

If you know of that, then perhaps try the HP USB Format Utility. That is a great format tool. There is another but I forgot the name. Could always boot to a live usb linux distro and use gparted.

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Thanks for the advice! It is a 750Gb HDD. I knew about the conversion, but did not do the calculation until now. Most of the difference is made up by the base 10 to 2 conversion. I did find several scraps of the old linux OS with Testdisk, and will try booting to with a usb distro to remove.

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Yeah the difference in conversion can get pretty brutal. Especially with multi-TB drives. Glad you got it all sorted.

Semi-useful screenie:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]10145[/ATTACH]

Base 10 Base 2
60GB 55.5GB
1TB 931GB
2TB 1.81TB
3TB 2.72GB


You start "losing" a lot once you change what base you are calculating with.
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Yeah, it is frustrating, especially since TB became a common unit.

I built a RAIDZ3 pool of 9 2TB drives. 18TB total, but since 3 drives are for redundancy I only have 12TB, and thanks to the terabyte/tebibyte issue I end up with a bit less than 10TB.

Needless to say that that drive is almost full.

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