Drive running out of space when not full

Discussion in 'Storage Devices' started by shortridge11, Oct 28, 2008.

  1. shortridge11

    shortridge11 Geek Trainee

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    I have a 750 or 700 gig external drive and i have been trying to fill it up. I move folders of about 4-9 gigs a piece to it, and after about 2-3 of these folders it stops and throws an error saying it ran out of space. Now at the most, the folders have taken up 20 gigs out of 700g. This is a reoccurring incident. The only fix i can find is to throw the files inside a folder on the hd. Instead of putting all the folders on the root of the drive, i make a folder foo, and put everything in foo. I am trying to copy all of them at once, about 100 gigs of info. Any ideas why i'm getting this error?
     
  2. manic49er

    manic49er Geek Trainee

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    I'm a little hazy on actual #'s but back in the DOS days I believe there was a limit on how many files/folders(upper main ones) could be listed in root, was fairly low like 128-256 I believe. I personally am not sure if we still have that legacy limit on HD root dirs on these huge new HDs with XP and/or Vista still, but maybe?

    regards,
    manic49er
     
  3. shortridge11

    shortridge11 Geek Trainee

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    nah. I found out that there are about 3-4 folders that throw this error. All the others are fine, but when i try to copy these ones over i get the "too full" error. Can a corrupted file do this?
     
  4. manic49er

    manic49er Geek Trainee

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    I'm sure they could if it the size allocation part for the folder was corrupted (part of the FAT or whatever does same function on NTFS HD's).

    regards,
    manic49er
     
  5. donkey42

    donkey42 plank

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    how big is the partition on the HDD ?

    & what filesystem is the partition, & what is your OS ?
     
  6. megamaced

    megamaced Geek Geek Geek!

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    Indeed. FAT can only handle files of a certain size. More information is needed.
     

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