I have an external usb drive with a 20 Go size formatted in fat32. My computer is a linux fedora core 3.

My problem is that only 11 Go are used (I can see it with the 'du' command ). I have verified the used space under windows also: it's the same, 11 Go. Normally the free space should be 9 Go.... But linux detects only 600 Mo of free space. So I can't write big files on the drive with linux. Everything is ok with Windows which can use all the available space.

I have done a dosfsck -a /dev/sda1 but it doesn't changed anything.

What can I do to recover all the free space with linux ?

Yann

First of all, how is this being mounted.. and secondly.. what is Go and Mo? Are you referring to GB and MB.. gigabytes and megabytes? And any other helpful details of like.. what kind of USB drive is it, output of dmesg when its plugged in.. etc.

Ouups,
Go and Mo mean GB and MB (it was in french..)

I have nearly resolved the problem. The external usb drive is used between Windows and linux. But if I delete files in windows, the available space is not detected after by linux. I mount and umount the drive correctly (I think...) with the hal daemon.

I have found a solution:
fsck.vfat -a /dev/sda1
the only drawback is that I need to do it manually regularly. I have tried also dosfsck but it doesn't work...