External Hard Drive problems

hey.
i have a 320 gigabyte portable external hard-drive. it's a maxtor.
lately i have been having problems with it
it says it has 283MB free space (which i'd expect)
but when i try to delete something off it, it still says 283MB free.
i have tried restarting pc and unplugging the phd.
i did try a disk check, it says "the drive F: contains an invalid parametre"
and it also says it can only do the diskcheck in "read-only-mode"
i can't re-format cause i have no where for the files to go.
is there any-way to fix it?
oh by the way i have ran a disk check on it before this happened and it said something about corrupt indexes and clusters.
thankyou :)

What application are you using to "disk check"?

the windows disk check
i used cmd and typed this command:
chkdsk f:

Have you tried using the disk manufacturer's utility instead of checkdisk?

i don't think maxtor has a disk check utility.
all i want to know is: is there a way to make it so i can delete stuff from it, and make it move from 283MB free space.

Maxtor was bought by Seagate.

I would go to Seagate.com and see what relevant utilities I could find.

The drive isn't going to fix itself. It obviously has some significant problems.

You could give up on it and buy another. You can pound Google for people with similar problems. You can live with the problem. You could see if you can run checkdisk with other switches.

Maxtor hasn't been in business for several years, so the drive just may be dying of old age.

Make sure your data is safe. That drive looks like it has a corrupted file system, backup your data- at least the critical files. If necessary , use a utility like Recuva. If you dont have any space on your computer, backup to dvd or buy a new external. Format the Maxtor after that.

Its not a very good idea to cramp the drive with almost 100% data.