I feel like I abuse the system, always asking away yet never being able to help others

 

Ok, my external Hard Drive has the capacity of 640 GB. In explorer and it says that there is 380 GB free space still... However, I am unable to copy anything to it, giving me the error message "Cannot copy. Not enough free Disc space".

 

I have copied and moved files with this Hard Drive many times and I have had way more data on it previously... This is the first time I have expirienced anything like this. Please help.

 

The Hard drive uses FAT32 file system and my Pc is NTFS I dont know if that could be reason yet its never bothered before.

 

Thanx in advance to all you "boffins"

Sounds like the file system might be borked. Try running a disk check utility on it. IIRC Windows has one built in for FAT32.

Download and install Defraggler disk defragmenter.

 

http://www.filehippo.com/download_defraggler

 

Select the external drive from the list at the top and click the 'Analyze' button at the bottom. This will give you a pictorial idea of the amount and distribution of your files on it and hopefully a true picture of the free space left.

 

It won't sort the problem but it will ascertain the space situation on the drive.

could be trashed files and shadow copies maybe, windows is good at hiding that stuff from the average user.

 

me: 'wtf since when did i get 15GB of temporary files?'

vista: 'no you don't'

me: i'm looking at them right now

vista: lalalala

InsaneAlien: CCleaner has a facility under the Tools > System Restore tab that allows you to manually remove excessive numbers of Restore points..it saves and prevents deletion of the latest one by default.

don't really care. i use linux 99% of the time anyway.

if you're trying to copy a file >4GB to the fat 32 HDD it'll throw the same error as a full HDD.

could be trashed files and shadow copies maybe, windows is good at hiding that stuff from the average user.

 

me: 'wtf since when did i get 15GB of temporary files?'

vista: 'no you don't'

me: i'm looking at them right now

vista: lalalala

So you talk to your vista often? That explains this quote.

Thanx all for the great response.

 

I defraged with the built in windows app. Still no luck. So I backed up my data, formatted and moved the data back. Works like a charm (or at least as it should work) now.

 

Thanx again all

 

Vista is terrible . I moved back to Xp after one week of Vista. Haha

 

Ciao