Hi

For those of us who regularly use a memory stick, usb flash drive you might be faced with an apparent memory loss or non availability of memory not in consonance with the rated capacity. This is because of the way .trash is handled, any movement to trash is placed on the removable media itself and this occupies space.

To rectify this do show hidden folders and then either empty trash or delete it.

I deleted my .trash but am missing about 600MB off my 2GB stick:
$du -ks /media/USB\ DISK/
1435356 /media/USB DISK/

$ df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 18421552 4562148 12923620 27% /
varrun 322944 84 322860 1% /var/run
varlock 322944 4 322940 1% /var/lock
udev 322944 96 322848 1% /dev
devshm 322944 0 322944 0% /dev/shm
lrm 322944 18856 304088 6% /lib/modules/2.6.15-23-386/volatile
/dev/sda1 1978052 1889532 88520 96% /media/USB DISK

Why only 88MB free when du reports only 1.4GB used (which is correct)?
Windoze reports the correct amount of free space.

It's formatted FAT32 and I'm running ubuntu 6.1
Def. no hidden files here.

Any help appreciated.

I've had a similar issue with two drives of my own. After using them in a certain college computer lab they both lost half of their original capacity. A 128M can't hold more than 66M! I looked for hidden files, checked the status in both Win2K and Slackware, checked the output of fdisk and everything suggested the maximum capacity is 128 but any attempt to store above 66 produces an error about the disk being full. I even tried reformatting it. I still haven't found a solution and the lab guy doesn't know how it could've happened. The way the machines are setup, there's no system tray icon to stop a USB device before removing it, and no access to device manager.

It took me ages to realise that at first.