I am trying to copy files onto an external hard-drive using a server running the 2.4.20-2m version of Linux. I am getting an error message stating that there is no space left on the drive. When I run df on the drive, it reports one of two things: 1) the drive is at 101% capacity, or 2) the drive is at 4% of capacity (160gig drive). The latter is the one that should be correct. I would like to simply format the drive, but being a newbie at linux, I don't really know how to do this for the specific external drive, and I don't want to trash the rest of the system. Altnernatively, I would like to find some sort of check disk command to get more information about the problem.

mkfs
Is this what you want?