Western Digital External Hard drive is not recognizing available space

[Nriz720]

I don't remember how much it was originally built to handle, but today when I went to add a movie on to it it told me that there was not enough free space available.

I pulled up the information and it said i was only using 35GB and it said I only had 600 some MB available. I tried deleting a movie file from it and the available space amount did not change. I added the movie file back on to it and it took away even more space! I now only have 273 MB available on a hard drive that should contain much much more.

Does anyone have any idea of whats going on here?


EDIT- out of nowhere it's reading that 37GB are being used when before it only said 35GB. The available space did not change. What in the world is going on

 

[BlueRevolution]

Open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app, select the drive with a USB icon in the left-hand list that says something like "698 GB WD12345 Media", and click the Partition tab. Does the partition shown in the chart appear to fill the entire drive?

 

[Nriz720]

Im not sure, mine said 232.9 GB WD 2500JS External Hard Drive. I clicked on it, clicked partition, and where it says 'size' it says 232.88 GB. Does that answer your question?

 

[BlueRevolution]

And in Finder, if you select the drive and go to File -> Get Info, what does it say for capacity/available/used?

 

[Nriz720]

capacity: 232.83 GB
available : 274 MB
Used: 232.56 GB

But there's no way thats right. and when I plug into my PS3 to watch movies it tells my Im only using 35GB, which to me seems more accurate.

Even looking at the files I have, there are 61 files, and the majority of which are under a GB. Theres no possible way I am using up all the space.

 

[BlueRevolution]

Have you emptied the trash?

Try using OmniDiskSweeper on the drive. Just don't delete anything unless you know what it is.

 

[Nriz720]

wow thatll do it. thanks so much.

Is it advisable to run omnidisksweeper on my laptops hard drive too?

 

[BlueRevolution]

Sure, you can run it anywhere you want. OmniDiskSweeper doesn't do anything automatically, it just helps you to find big stuff. Again, if you don't know what it is, don't mess with it.