I have a backup drive formatted ext4 which got filled to no space left,
so I deleted some files and folders to make space on it , emptied the trash, files and folders are gone , but it stll says I got no drive space left on it and cant copy a file to it because it thinks its full lol
I freed up like 15gb of space on it , have rebooted several times ..
what did I miss lol

Enter into console The 4th column show empty space, check this. You can also install kdirstat or other disk usage program. It graphicaly show you space occupied by files.

/dev/sda1 276G 266G 0 100%
size used avail use

Are all your normal drives IDE then ?

Because sda is usually the first scsi or SATA drive in the system.

Show us the full df -h output (in code tags please)

yeah my pri master is ide then my 300 gig back is sata
but my root is on ide.. so that was the right output for the drive i'm talking about , but here is the rest
bu64:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 142G 8.6G 126G 7% /
none 1001M 280K 1001M 1% /dev
none 1005M 1.2M 1004M 1% /dev/shm
none 1005M 88K 1005M 1% /var/run
none 1005M 0 1005M 0% /var/lock
none 1005M 0 1005M 0% /lib/init/rw
none 142G 8.6G 126G 7% /var/lib/ureadahead/debugfs
/dev/sda1 276G 266G 0 100% /media/data

I think you have 10GB reserved space for system, journal or something. During format the default is 5% disk capacity reserved for root user (for your sda1 it will be 13GB). Maybe you write some files as root and now as normal user cannot write more. Try free more space.

If you're sure you deleted the data from the correct drive, then umount /media/data and fsck it.

k thx for the replies , just didnt want to delete more than I had to to see if that was the solution
thanks!