OSX 10.5.8: spurious "cannot be copied because there is not enough free space"

I'm trying to rehabilitate my G5 tower

• OSX 10.5.8
• two HD in the bays.

The problem:

• Both the boot disk (1TB) and the second disk (300GB) have a lot of space on them.
• The 1TB has 800GB free, the other has nothing on it (290+GB free).

Yet when I drag a file "foo" from the 1TB to the empty drive, it fails with:

The item "foo" cannot be copied because there is not enough free space

Copying from the 1TB to the same 1TB drive (in another place) works fine!

I've run Disk Utility on both and repaired all the permissions, but I still get this error.

What is the deal? Any ideas?

I'm willing to erase the startup volume, but I have to find a Leopard disk somewhere!

Solution 1:

It may sound strange, but this can be caused by incorrect date and time. I have had the same problem and after setting correct date and time, problem doesn't exist anymore.

Solution 2:

I still don't know what caused this. But the workaround was:

• reformat the hard drive again, as Journaled
• set the Trash preference to "zero" (it was previously set to the less-secure "do nothing"
• reboot

Our speculation is that some deep-in-the-filesystem thing was messed up on the device.