I'm wondering if the rest of the stick is properly formatted? Maybe you could try moving the file to your hard drive temporarily and formatting the stick.

Thanks Eris, I already did that and I clicked format, and didnt get any errors but it didn't format either. The file is still there.

Hidden files/directories? Corrupeted filesystem?

First try to list content with:

ls -al /run/media/molly/

to verify there is what you believe there is. And verify % of utilization with:

df -m /run/media/molly/

Then try to fix filesystem, f.e. visit this page:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/147228/h ... ile-system

some command line skills are needed, of course.

yes, chances are that USB has more partitions now, in this case reformatting it into "single partition mode" would be the simpliest solution of the problem..

@ Saulgoode, thank you very much for this info. I don't use Windows. I use Linux Fedora but I do have Windows7 on my other hard drive. I will download this app and try it and see what happens. You have always been able to rescue me and my dilemmas... lol
@tibor95 Thanks you also for your instructions. I will try Sauls first. Even though I do use Fedora, I am still very green when it comes to all the terminal commands it entails.

Ok, I downloaded that little app over in windows and worked like a charm. Many thanks. I put the backup file back on it and the USB shows almost full, In fact the little sliver used doesn't even show up, it is so small. woo hoo.

I tried downloading this but I kept getting a page not found error message.

Eris, On the 404 page, click home page then try about the 3rd or 4th one down then click English. All the languages are along the top

Thank you Molly - it was the third one down.

Well, you throwed away an opportunity to learn some small bit about linux and filesystems and partitions. And also will never know what was wrong ...
Of course, if you are not interested in these things (as it seems) this was the easiest solution...

I am very interested in learning new commands, but this thing had to be done sooner rather than later so I took the easiest way. I guess you shouldn't always assume.

You've already solved the problem, but I have found out that if I delete something from the flashdrive, I need to empty the trash folder on the computer or I get the same problem.

I suspect what happened stems from a decade's old bug in Windows (that wasn't fixed until Vista). Windows had a propensity to confuse USB pendrives with network shares and would under certain circumstances assign them the same drive letter. For this reason, pendrives typically had four partitions on them with the first three being of minimal size and only the fourth one used for data. This way if the pendrive had drive letters E:, F:, G:, and H: assigned then only H: would be used, which (kludgily) protected network shares that might happen to use the drive letters E:, F:, and G:.

Somehow molly's pendrive was using this partitioning scheme and Fedora (I am guessing) mounted the first partition and her file was saved to the first partition, taking up most all of its 1Mb space. Admittedly this does not explain the report of 900Mb being used, but for some reason the disk usage was misreported.

Yes, nixnine, I think you are correct. I did empty mine.

Yes, on linux there is not a standard all-window-managers and all-file-managers settings for trash behavior. Investigate the setting of your file manager. Some of them offers per-filesystem setting, or you will be allowed to set % size of trash vs. particular filesystem, or disable the trash alltogether...

It would be sweet if molly downloaded&installed new application and reformatted the USB because of full trash

(I believe everybody know that a trash is a standard directory, only hidden (starting with dot))

I really don't think USBs are 100 percent reliable. I had a 16GB crash on me and I lost 3 years worth of photos and data. It was recommended to me to save anything important on a CD or DVD.

What new application should I install?

Neither HDD, USB nor CD/DVD are reliable, of course...

I meant BOOTICE - the tool you formatted your USB with...