formatting issues with qtparted

[matttail]

Ok, so I've got a 40 gig hd hooked up to my computer. I need to format it and then copy files onto it to use as a backup drive as my windws installaiton died. I used qtparted to clear out the previous partition onthe HD, and then asked it for format it in ext3. That all went just swell, but it says that there is 2.33 gig used... but I just formated - it should be empty!

So, I asked qtparted to format it into fat32... and this time only 32mb was used.

But I'd rather just use a linux format so there's less work converting between file systems... does that make sense?

I was going to try using format from the command line, but that says command not found. So, pleaese help me, what is the best way to go about accomplish my task of formatting the HD, and how should I do it? I'm not a total n00b with linux but I'm not any kid of expirenced user either. Thanks :)

(Oh, and I'm sorry if this has been asked before, but I did search and I couldn't find anything)

[OErjan]

the ext3 filesystem WILL use a bit of space to make journals. that is information that help recover errors from powerfailiures, incorect shutdown, incomplete writes...
as it says in the manual for mkfs.ext3

-J journal-options
Create the ext3 journal using options specified on the command-line. Journal options are comma separated, and may take an argument using
the equals ('=') sign. The following journal options are supported:

size=journal-size
Create an internal journal (i.e., stored inside the filesystem) of size journal-size megabytes. The size of the journal must
be at least 1024 filesystem blocks (i.e., 1MB if using 1k blocks, 4MB if using 4k blocks, etc.) and may be no more than
102,400 filesystem blocks.
that is if you issue the comand
mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 -cc -j /dev/hd
in a 100M filesystem, you will at LEAST loose 4Mb, that is one inode, for the recoveryjournal