Fat32 Disk full fault

[spg666]

This is odd, I have a 8GB flash drive which is formatted fat32 in windows XP its half full but if I try and use it with linux (xandros or backtrack3) it's has got next to no free space.

Whats going on?

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Does Linux lists files/folders of Flash drive? What is the output of this

df -h

?

[spg666]

Hi,

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 1.4G 115M 1.3G 9% /
/dev/sda1 1.4G 115M 1.3G 9% /
unionfs 1.4G 115M 1.3G 9% /
tmpfs 443M 12K 443M 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 128M 52K 128M 1% /tmp
/dev/sdc1 7.5G 7.5G 0 100% /media/DataBar USB2.0/USB_STICK

as you can see it report dev/sdc1 as full when I know it is not. All the files/folders are accessable. If i look at the properties of the root folder on that device it reports 5000 files in 350 folders occupying 4.5GB which is about right.

[devils casper]

Check if there is any hidden folder.

ls -a

[spg666]

Just tried a quick experiment, place a large file (350mb) on the usb stick in windows, plugged it in to the linux machine and deleted it.

df -h reports
dev/sdc1 7.5G 7.2G 321M 96% /media/DataBar USB2.0/USB_STICK

[devils casper]

Is there any Recycled Folder in USB Stick?

[spg666]

no hidden folders.... or Recycle folders

I'm going to fill up the free space with large files in windows then delete them in linux to see if i get the free space back

[spg666]

That worked, got the free space back. So I've got a fix but would love to know what is going on.