Amacom USB FlipDisk success but wrong size reported

[alans]

I have Mandrake 10.1 with hotplug service enabled and Amacom 10GB usb disk. I want to use it to backup documents stored in home directories.

Fine - its mounted. It appears on Desktop at login. KDE3.2. The device is /dev/sda1 and mounted at /mnt/removable. Cool

Using Mandrakes Control panel as su root, I have configured a backup of the documents. However the Amacom disk size is reported through backup this interface as only having 500MB space and can only be reduced. I have reformated it, re partioned it and set it to file system ext3. It is reported by harddrake as 9.3GB free

Today I manually tried to tar a backup to it but this failed as the disk size was reported as insufficient. I am a real newbie with linux and hoped that Madrake would make it all painless. I have set this up as Samba server for a peer2peer network OK but I am stuck with what to investigate next.

Is it just incompatible hardware? Fine I'll go get a compatible external disk. BUt before that I have to rule out newbieness.

Any suggestions on what to check would be great.

cheers
alan s

[alans]

Have checked drive via Webmin and Harddrake and it still reports a 10 gb drive with 9.5GB free.

When its mounted in KDE and you lok at the properties of the drive it only shows about 780MB available.

Any suggestions on what to look for here appreciated.....

alans