2Gb clip says it's full... but only 200mb loaded! HALP!

I searched 15 pages for an answer but no joy.

Anyone else had this problem?.

When I do a ‘Get Info’ (I’m a Mac user - same as ‘Properties’ on Windows) it tells me

I have 1.9Gb used which is nonsense cos’ there’s only 200mb in the music folder.

I have reset, deleted ‘MTABLE.SYS’ cos’ I read a thread that had a similar theme and

now I dunno what to do. Apart from re-formatting which I don’t want to have to do every

time I want to add an album or whatever…

Any suggestions gratefully received.

Well, if you were on a PC, I would suspect the old MSC/MTP confusion. I believe the MAC will only work in MSC mode so two things:

  1. Has this thing ever been loaded from a PC

  2. You don’t mention if you actually did a format. I would do this (after saving loaded music), check only minimum space is being indicated by both your machine and the device. Check the device under settings, then go from there.

since you are using a MAC the first question is, have you deleted files from the device? if so did you disconnect the mp3 player before emptying the trash? if so this is what is causing the issue. when files are deleted from a removable drive on a MAC you have to empty the trash before disconnecting the device. if you do not it will not actually free the space. you can try connecting the mp3 player back to the MAC and empty the trash to see if that will free up the space. if it does not you will have to use disk utility to format the drive. make sure you choose MS DOS as the file type if you have to format in disk utility. once formatted you will see all the free space and you can reload your files. if you delete files in the future make sure to empty the trash before disconnecting the drive. 

Thanks for your reply Dave.

  1. Never been on a PC.

  2. I did a format AFTER posting my message. Loaded some albums on, checked the

actual Clip itself and checked on my Mac after connecting the Clip. Everything OK.

I think the gentleman below may well have the answer.

Thanks for your reply drlucky.

I believe you may have nailed it although I can’t actually test this now because I left the Clip at work.

However, I 'm almost certain I wouldn’t have remembered to empty the trash before I disconnected

the Clip.

The only other removable device I have used on the Mac was my old iPod Shuffle, which I’ve only

been able to load/delete files from through iTunes… therefore this has never been an issue.

I did a reformat through the actual Clip itself…not through Disk Utility… and loaded up some stuff

and all seems well. Everything’s loaded and playing fine and the correct amount of free memory is

showing on the Clip.

I don’t use a Mac and certainly drlucky’s explanation makes sense. I’ve never paid much attention to the trash folder on a pc. It looks as if devices like flash cards and I would assume floppies don’t have one, external usb hd does. I suppose the Mac approach is more logical. On a pc, it’s possible to have a drive not use the recoverable trash feature (right click on trash icon and select properties). Does the Mac offer similar flexibility?