Using tune2fs to maintain disks and free up space

By Unholy Moley!
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Unholy Moley!

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tune2fs is a useful tool that allows users to adjust ext2/ext3 filesystem options. Chances are that the amount of times Linux does a fsck disk scan on boot is too frequent, or the default %1 reserved space on the file system is amounting to a significant portion of the hard drive. Using tune2fs, you can change these settings and more to better suit your needs.

Before you begin, you should get the names of your hard disks. You can use the command df in the terminal, or you can use System Monitor, shown below:

post-149838-1204575192_thumb.png

Freeing up reserved space

When you format a drive to ext2/ext3, some of that space is reserved automatically. This is a good thing for your root partition because if you fill up the hard drive, Linux will still have space to write to the log file and such. However, if you have say a 350GB hard drive, that 1% amounts to something significant. Additionally, you may not want reserved space on hard drives that are formatted in ext2/3 and are just used for storage.

Set the amount of reserved space to 0%:

tune2fs -m 0 /dev/HARDDRIVE

Set the amount of reserved blocks to 20000, which should be more than sufficient:

tune2fs -r 20000 /dev/HARDDRIVE

Telling tune2fs when to do fsck

If errors are found on the file system, fsck will run no matter what. fsck will also run automatically after 30 mounts by default in Ubuntu. You can use tune2fs to increase the number of mounts and/or have it run after a certain amount of days.

fsck will run after 80 mounts:

tune2fs -c 80 /dev/HARDDRIVE

fsck will disregard the number of mounts:

tune2fs -c 0 /dev/HARDDRIVE

fsck will run after 3 days, 2 months and 1 week

tune2fs -i d3 m2 w1 /dev/HARDDRIVE

Setting a volume label

Want to name your harddrive? You can do that too.

tune2fs -L PORNDRIVE /dev/HARDDRIVE

Edited by Unholy Moley!
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