Problem with external HD reporting it's full when I try to copy

[QueBert]

I have a 320 gig HD in an external USB enclosure, one of the partitions had 50'ish gigs of free space. I tried to copy an ISO I made from a game I bought, it was telling me "not enough room run disk cleanup" I double checked the space and sure enough I had 50 gigs, the ISO was about 4.1 gigs. I was chkdsk and it didn't find any problems, Acronis is showing the partition as fine. I'm not experience any read or write problems with the drive.

So today I go to copy some mp3's to it, before I started I deleted some stuff, had about 75 free gigs and 50 gigs of mp3's. I start the copy and come back to see the "not enough free space" error again, open up a cmd box and the partition is showing 600k free, I should have had somewhere between 15-20 gigs after every mp3 copied, it got about 85% from the looks of it and was full.

I am confused, don't know what other utilities I can run on the drive, it's an Enermax Glory (if that helps anyone) I can't see it being a problem with the enclousre being bad as it's reporting the proper free space in explorer. Or at least it should be.

any ideas how to fix this? I'm about to wipe one of the partitions on it clean and try copying a file and see exactly how much space it's taking in relation to how big the file actually is.

 

[SilthDraeth]

Do you have an iso of a linux image? You can boot to CD into something like Knoppix, or Damn Small Linux, and mount the drive, then look at the free space, and size of files.

I haven't heard of anything like this before though.

 

[robisbell]

sounds like the drive has your swap file on it.

 

[QueBert]

the swap file shouldn't take that much room, I'm trying to copy a 4 gig image to a partition with 50+ gigs free, that would be some swap file. What you're saying makes sense but I wonder if that's it how the hell the files eating up so much space.

and to SilthDraeth no I don't, but I have a UBCD which has some dos level utilities that work with NTFS good idea I will boot with that and see what it tells me.

 

[robisbell]

a swap file can grow if you do any gaming, video, or graphics, it'll get quite large. you did enable viewing of hidden files and folders and system files on the drive when you were checking it out?

 

[redbeard1]

If your external drive is formatted fat32, the largest single file size is limited to 4 gb.

Fat 32 file size limit

 

[robisbell]

oh ah heck, I forgot to ask that, but I think it's formatted as NTFS. going by his last statement.

 

[QueBert]

one of the partitions is Fat32, that's the one I was trying to copy the mp3's to, the ISO I was copying to an NTFS one though. Weirdest issue I've ever seen.

 

[robisbell]

what is on the fat32 partition? whats on the ntfs one? how big is each?

 

[QueBert]

ok, I took the ISO and used winrar to split it into 700 meg chunks, tried copying the ISO first "not enough space" copied the RAR's fine.

the partition is NTFS, so it's either somehow seeing it as fat32, or it's totally unexplainable. either way I'm confused and going to give up.

 

[robisbell]

can you fit the data on the main drive temporarily? I'd do that then wipe out the partitions on the external and redo them and reformat them. then try copying again.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: QueBert
ok, I took the ISO and used winrar to split it into 700 meg chunks, tried copying the ISO first "not enough space" copied the RAR's fine.

the partition is NTFS, so it's either somehow seeing it as fat32, or it's totally unexplainable. either way I'm confused and going to give up.

What does CHKDSK say when you run it against the bad partitions?