My external hardrive thinks its full.

[benw567]

Hi i have already tried to find the solution of this problem but so far most have been regarding 'emptying trash' which i have already done.
Basically i filled my external seagate 500gb hardrive up with movies - then because a friend wanted me to give some music, i freed up some space on my hardrive by moving 110gb worth of films on to mac internal hd.

Anyway, its now come to the point where i'm trying to put these films back on to my ext hd - however it won't let me put them on.

when i right-click my ext harddirve on finder and press get info it says 'capacity 499.76 - available 100.56bg- used 399.206g' but when i try and move a movie file back onto the ext HD - (yes i have tried doing 1 file at a time) - it is saying that there is not enough free space.

i've tried 'emptying trash' and 'secure empty trash' - not sure what to do!

please help!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

To find out, where you hard drive capacity is being used, if it is falsely reported by Finder, you can use the following free applications:

• DiskInventory X
• OmniDiskSweeper
• JDisk Report
• GrandPerspective

Maybe try a combination of several, if you still can't find the "missing" capacity.

Have you checked Finder > select external HDD >> GET INFO >>> Format and Sharing & Permissions yet?

 

[CylonGlitch]

Some formats will only allow a limited number of files in the root directory. Once it hits this limit, no additional files can be added and it reports back drive full. To fix it, delete a file or two, create a sub directory, and then move all the files into that sub-directory.

All of the FAT formatted disks suffer this problem, I don't know if the others do as well.