[Nikolai553]

Currently I own a external Hard drive which uses a 2.0 USB cord to transfer data. This hd has a max space of 400gb to use and currently I'm using 240 gb out of the 400 gb total Which leaves 131 gb of free space. My problem is I get a message stating my hard drive is full and I should remove some data. with 131 gigs of free space that is hardly full.. I have defragged and cleared any restore points and such on this HD and I have searched the net for a answer but no one else seems to have this problem.

any suggestions?

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are you sure it is your external drive and not your internal drive? usally windows complains once your drive of which it is installed on is low on space. Windows will trip anywhere between 500megs to 5 gigs. depends on computer settings usally around 1.5 gigs it will trip and warn you.

and welcome.

[amw_drizz]

are you sure it is your external drive and not your internal drive? usally windows complains once your drive of which it is installed on is low on space. Windows will trip anywhere between 500megs to 5 gigs. depends on computer settings usally around 1.5 gigs it will trip and warn you.

and welcome.

[Nikolai553]

yes the drive external it is right in front of me

the drive is a E Elements 400gb plug and play drive powered by WD

[shard92]

Yes but is the computer complaining about that drive or the internal drive that windows is installed on....

Maybe you need to tell us exactly what it says and when and what are you doing when it says that....

[amw_drizz]

i have a feeling of which windows is not complaining about your external, unless you have core system files on it or a page file that takes up more than what is really needed.

But please tell us some more about the notification that is popping up. also tell us the size of your internal drive along with used / free space. as that will give us more information

[Nikolai553]

my internal hd is a 80gb with 31gb used


the message says:

there is not enough free space

delete one or more files to free disk space, and then try again

to free disk space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, click disk clean up



I have completed a disk clean up so thats not it

[shard92]

What are you doing when it gives you that error... what version of windows and what version service pack are you running... Have you tried running the computer without the external drive to see if you still get errors?

[The Skeptic]

To make sure that we talk about the same drive please disconnect the USB drive from the computer and let us know what happens.

[Nikolai553]

my problem is the external drive stating it is full while my other computer sources say I have over 145 gigs of free space


I am running xp home edition service pack 2, version 2002


I get this message when ever i try to add more files into my external drive, such as a 10mb size file. As I have said before this acts like the drive is full but I still have a very large amount of free space. No way could I of hit a buffer zone yet..

so if i try to add more files to this drive I get a message saying it is full, now if i remove a file to free space up I can then add in other files just like if the drive was actually full.

[The Skeptic]

Have you tried to physically disconnect the drive entirely? As you can see from previous posts the helpers want to make sure that you are not mistaking the drives. Since it takes 2.5 seconds, please do that.

Is your external drive divided into partitions? If yes, please report the size of each and how much free space you have on each. Right click each partition in My Computer and report.

Do you have "restore" option enabled in all your drives and partitions? If not, enable it.

[Nikolai553]

yes diconnecting the drive solved the problem but now how do I use the files of that drive? I replugged the drive in and its the same problem


if by partitions you mean two differnt drives from the my computer button then yes. All I did with this drive was plug it into the usb and into a wall socket then I began uploading files over the past few months.

[Abydos]

Hi Nikolai553

~Scratch~

Wrong advice, my apology and
sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards Abydos

Edited by Abydos, 13 June 2008 - 04:26 AM.

[The Skeptic]

Hi Abydos.

My experience is that changing drive letters can end in disaster. I wouldn't recommend it as a remedy under any circumstances.

Could you tell us what motherboard and CPU you are having on this computer? I would check if it's capable of handling 400GB in one partition. If it does, then I would ,first of all, run some malware scans with a good antivirus and antispyware. After cleaning the disk I would backup the data to another storage device, reformat the external drive and paste the data back.

[Nikolai553]

yeah that is what I was thinking if I changed the drive letter

I currently have a

cpu: pentium D 925 3.0 ghz

motherboard: xfx 680i Lt


I currently have avast and AVG running and I have scanned with both programs the drive shows up clean.

I also discovered I can use a installation program to add programs to the drive but if I try to copy and paste or cut and paste a file the message pops up.


I found out both drives are set to primary partitions. shown as blue

Edited by Nikolai553, 12 June 2008 - 03:00 PM.

[Nikolai553]

any news?