wrong free space with vfat

Hi,

Recently i connected my externeal USB2.0 hard disk to my Suse Linux Server. Everything worked correctly. The Harddisk was mounted by subfs and the two fat32 partitions were accesable immediatly. Subfs is comfortable but it has two disadvantages: it is slow and i cannot see the the free space when typing "df -h". So I mounted the first partion with "mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /media/test". Now the speed was fast and everything worked fine. Then I took a look at the free space by typing "df -h" and I was surprised that I had 30 GBs free while the Windows XP machine (on which I used the hard disk before) told me that on the first partition 9 GB are free.
I thought that it is the common problem of fat32 that the free space isn't calculated correctly. So I used fsck und also on Windows scandisk to correct this, but the problem is still here. Windows tells me that I have 9GBs free, while "df -h" tells me i have 30GBs free. Surprising that Windows and Linux tell me that the partition has 112GB in total and the size of the folders on the partition is 103 GB (this would be a total of 9GB free, so I thing Windows is right, an Linux has a problem)
Now I am worried about my data, because I don't know if it's only the free space that's shown wrong or if theres a heavy problem with either the hard disk or the Linux vfat kernel module.
Is there anyone with the same or a similar problem? Or anyone who has an idea what's the cause of the wrong free space shown on Linux and maybe how to fix the problem?

Please don't tell me, that my english is bad, I know it, but I am from Austria, but in the german speaking news groups no one was able to help me. And with google I didn't even find my problem (only the common bug about the wrong free space calculation, that can be fixed with fsck or scandisk).



Thomas



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