Full Disk, but not really

My 4GB Clip is about 18 months old.  I recently reformatted and updated to the latest firmware after checking the site because of a problem, and it seemed to be working fine.  I hadn’t completely restored my music directory yet, so there was only a couple of hundred MB of WMA files in it, and also another 300 MB or so of MP3 podcasts (“podcast” being MP3 from iTunes but also full audiobooks from librivox.org which are generally several hundred MB of chapter files in MP3 format, but are not “Audible.com” audiobooks for that directory.)  All my other Clip directories were empty.  

I run XP Home on my computer.  I have the Clip set to MSC mode and don’t use any playlists or other features to organize content aside from the built in menus.

Just this morning I went to delete old and add new podcasts (a couple of those librivox books) I’d downloaded to the PC, by dragging and dropping across Explorer windows.  Suddenly Explorer stopped and said the disk was full.  I right-clicked the Explorer Properties for the Clip disk and sure enough it showed a completely full 4GB disk.  I knew for a fact there was only about 1GB of data on it but it showed full.

I’ve done a reformat and reset everything, but it’s obviously a big nuisance, and I would really would like to know what might have caused the problem and how to avoid it.  Any help appreciated. 

Message Edited by internet2k4 on 07-28-2010 02:09 PM

Message Edited by internet2k4 on 07-28-2010 02:12 PM

You could have tried creating a new folder then transfered the new files to it to see if it was a FAT limitation issue.

Thanks for responding.  Don’t really understand.  I couldn’t add anything to any of the existing folders because it showed full 4GB.  I didn’t know that the firmware would recognize any “new folder.”

I guess the Clip is FAT - I used the Clip’s internal reformat and not used XP to reformat it.  I’m pretty sure that when I installed the new firmware it was a “clean install” and I only put in a limited amount of listening material after that, the most 1GB in Music and Podcast folders.  What could cause less than 1GB of actual files to suddenly show up as a full 4GB to fill the drive?

I know it’s not the response you want, but:  these things inexplicably happen …