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)