[crazypigeon]

My hard drive on my powerbook g4 filled up, and I purchased a seagate external hard drive for extra space. I moved about 40 gigs of files over to it, erased them from my hard drive, emptied the trash, and the internal still has no space. All the files are on the external, but they don't show up on the internal. How do I get the internal to realize these files have been moved and it has 40 gigs of space available?

[SpaceMonkey]

Have you tried restarting the PowerBook? Sometimes the Finder isn't very responsive to changes in available hard drive space, but I've never seen it completely ignore such a large-scale deletion.

[crazypigeon]

Yes I have... it is bizarre that it ignored it. It won't allow additions of files over 500m, so it definitely thinks it's full. But the files I moved are definitely not there. Maybe it has to do with strange compatibility issues with the seagate 200 gig external?

[ibook_steve]

Which OS are you running? How about creating a new empty folder, dropping it in the trash, and then emptying again? Also, do you have multiple accounts on this computer? Try creating an extra user and logging in as the test user. See if the hard drive still shows full there. If it still won't behave like the data was erased, you could try a clean install of the OS, copying over your account settings. But this is certainly a weird problem. Another idea: go to versiontracker and get Disk Inventory X. It will show you in a very clear graphic where your hard disk space is.

Steve