Empty USB hard drive shows 81% full

[Jeff Vian]

On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 17:19 -0600, Guy Fraser wrote:
> I have emptied the trash, run "sync" and rebooted.
> 
> $ sudo ls -la /media/SHUTTLE
> total 12
> drwxr-xr-x  2 guy  staff 4096 Dec 31  1969 .
> drwxr-xr-x  6 root root  4096 Sep 23 17:04 ..
> 
> $ df -h /media/SHUTTLE
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda2             5.3G  4.3G  1.1G  81% /media/SHUTTLE
> 
> I put the drive in a windows box and it indicates 
> that the drive is in fact empty [5.3G Available].
> 
> What's up with that?
> 

There may be a hidden directory that ls does not show with the -a
option.

Try ls -al "/media/*"
The name of the directory may be one or more non-printable characters so
it will not display, yet is actually there.
I had one case where a directory of that sort was created and ls would
not show it when in the local directory.   Yet if I did something like
"ls *" from the parent directory it would show up.

Doing a format will ensure such things are wiped out.