Missing disk space in external HDD

I have an external HDD, the partition in question is fat 32.
I use azureus to download stuff to it.

It keeps becoming 100% full, even though it should not be.
du -h . shows 291GB used
Yet df shows
/dev/sda5 as using up 320 GB (100% full).

This happened twice.
Thi time around, I had booted into windows and deleted 29 GB of stuff. Booted back into linux, started up azureus, and within 15 min, I'm getting 100% full.

What is going on ??

EDIT: I booted back into windows, and there I'm getting 29GB free, booted back into linux, 100% full ???

 

What distro are you using?

 

mandriva 2006
The external HDD is connected via PCMCIA USB port.

I plugged in to HDD to another laptop(with another disro), there also its showing 100% full.

 

A couple ideas:

I don't use Azereus, but some BT clients pre-allocate space. That is, if you DL a 10GB torrent, it will take up 10GB immediately (so that you can catch out-of-space errors immediately rather than while you're sleeping). Azereus probably has a preference to turn this on or off. This is usually done using some low-level FS calls, so it may not be 'visible' in windows, but I'm not too familiar with fat32 details.


Or, it may be possible that there is a lot of stuff in lost+found ? su to root and see.....? That stuff may not show up in windows, but it's just a guess too.

 

Well, what happens with thumb drives sometimes is that deleted files don't really go off the drive. Instead, they go into a folder called .Trash and if you don't do something correctly, then that will just keep expanding until the drive is full. In your file browser, allow it to show hidden files, and then see if you can find a folder by that name. If so, check it, and then delete it.

 

alternatively, if delete a bunch of files in Linux, make sure you empty your trash bin before you unmount the drive, that will clear the files out of the .trash folder.

 

Yeah, it's a little annoying because I forget a lot. However, in one way it's great because unlike windows, if you accidentally delete a file that you didn't mean to, it isn't immediately gone forever. I just wish they wouldn't hide the trash file. All it would entail is taking the period off the beginning...

 

I was no where downloading 29GB of stuff (so that shoots down the azureus reserving space theory.
And in windows, I made sure to emty the trash before I rebooted.

Finally I ran
fsck.vfat -a -v /dev/sdb5

It made some changes to some files in a directory, and said free clustor summary was wrong and corected it.
Now linux has the missing 29GB.