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What is the difference between free disk space and available disk space on a hard drive on a linux box?

I have realized that I have a discrepancy of 10GB on a 200GB partition between the available disk space and the free disk space.

In this case gnome system monitor says that I have 100GB free disk space and 88GB are available.

What does that mean? Why are these values so different?

that is because all operating systems need space to work with. some space is taken up with a section (partition) for swapping files in and out of memory…

when you buy a new hard drive and set it up, (fdisk it) lets say you have a 100 gig, it will be read as free space 99 gig the first section is for the MBS (master boot sector) that so that when you boot up the computer it reads the MBS so it knows what it can do with the hard drive space

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 7:33 am and is filed under space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “What is the difference between free disk space and available disk space on a hard drive on a linux box?”

  1. Carling says:
    March 5, 2010 at 1:07 pm

    that is because all operating systems need space to work with. some space is taken up with a section (partition) for swapping files in and out of memory…

    when you buy a new hard drive and set it up, (fdisk it) lets say you have a 100 gig, it will be read as free space 99 gig the first section is for the MBS (master boot sector) that so that when you boot up the computer it reads the MBS so it knows what it can do with the hard drive space
    References :

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