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I have recently purchased a WD Elements SE 1Tb external drive. I have set it up with dual partitions: FAT32 (primary) and HFS+ (secondary).

I also have a Macbook Pro 13 running Snow Leopard 10.6.6. I have the following issue:

When I plugin the hard drive, both partitions mount correctly. However, after a few seconds the free space on my macbooks harddrive starts to disappear, and if I leave the hardrive mounted, it continues until the OS reports "0 Kb" available.

If I unmount the FAT32 partition at any time, then the hard drive space stops going down. If I then also unmount the HFS+ partition, the hard drive space returns to it's original value. I really don't know what is going on here, and a google search doesn't seem to have helped.

I also looked at the console messages, but there doesn't seem to be any clues here...

This basically renders the external HD useless - help please!

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have you tried to format the entire drive and setup the partitions again? what partition scheme is it using, this can be found in disk utility. – jacklar Aug 23 '11 at 0:44
I actually used Disk Utility to setup the drive initially. The partition scheme is "Master Boot record". I would rather not reformat the entire drive now, as all my data is on it. Also, I noticed that my old WD 500Gb drive is also causing the same problem now, which suggests there is something weird going on with OSX... – Piyush Jain Aug 23 '11 at 17:48
try using a program like disk inventory X and run it to see if there is a specific file thats causing it to drain. I've seen log files goto extreme sizes but it should help narrow down where the space is going. – jacklar Aug 23 '11 at 18:46

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