every so often i go and take all my movies of of my computer and put them onto my external. well last night i did it and all of a sudden it says there isnt enough room. so i went to my computer and looked to see how much room it said it had and it i have like 100GB of room left and i was only putting like 3GB of movies in there... whats up w\ this?

how big is the drive? if your to close to capacity, they get finicky. (remember, a 500 gig drive is only 465 gigs storage)

@morph depends on your filesystem if this is the case or not =3

Ive seen
1]virus's do this, or
2]your HD might be dieing,or
3]your HD cable (rare but can happen)
4] oh power supply too

Its intermittent right?

if your files are 4GB and bigger, then your drive will need to be formatted to if you are using windows XP.

or in rare cases system restore from windows updates has sometimes saved to HDD. ( depends if the externals constantly plugged in -shadow copy file- ) try nuking the restore files on disk clean up under more options.

If not worse case full format of the external .

yeah, only time I ever had this prob was under windows XP, and trying to move files 4GB or bigger to the drive, kept saying I was out of room (the drive was just as it was out of the retail packaging, I only use it to transfer files from one PC to another). If this is the case with your file sizes, you'll have to format the external from winXP if thats the OS you are using. Format it to NTFS after stashing your movies somewhere, then pile them all back on and you shuold be good to go. I suppose asking you what OS you are using would be a better first step....lol

vista.....

That could explain a problem I am having at the moment. Thanks Viper.