Incorrect disk space reported by Konqueror / df for FAT32 HDD
 

I have a WD 150 GB portable HD, which is formatted in FAT32. I recently deleted approx. 25 GB of data while using the HD on my Windows XP machine. My OpenSuse 10.2 box reports that less than 5 GB is free. I checked this again on my WinXP box, and my laptop which runs OpenSuse 10.3 and both report 32 GB of free space. If I then plug the drive into my OpenSuse 10.2 box, df reports less than 5GB free. Strangely, du (on the same machine) reports approximately 118 GB of disk usage, which would give the [correct] 32 GB free.

I doubt that the free disk space is cached somewhere - if so can I refresh this? Also why would df and du give such radically different answers?

I don't want to format the HDD as I have back ups on it. Is there any way to look at the file allocation tables?

Unless you emptied the recycle bin they are still stored on the drive from where they were deleted. You can change this in the Recycle Bins properties or you can press shift while deleting files. Interesting that different versions show different results. The default bin size is 10% of the disk. Of course XP does in include recyle bin space as being used.

I'm pretty sure I Shift-deleted the files in the first place - the Recycle bins on all the machines were empty anyway.

But the problem seems to have resolved itself, as Konqueror now detects the correct amount of free space.