Not enough disk space?

February 23, 2005 • 12 comments

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Here's a good one for 'ya. Check out this screen shot I shot after installing a new Maxtor One Touch II 250 gig external drive today:

Two things are funny about this. First, looking at the diskspace number is quite outrageous isn't it? The thing is formatted and ready to go. You turn it on, plug in the wire and off you go.

The other things is the obvious though: If there's not enough disk space on this drive, I don't know how much you would need. <g>

The file I'm trying to copy is a Virtual PC XP image of course and the file is a mere 6 gig. For some reason it doesn't want to copy however - not from explorer (for some reason it wants me to clear up my D: drive telling me there's not enough space), nor using the DOS prompt as seen here.

I wonder what it is that is causing this. I was able to copy over some other large files with no problem. The D: drive also has 15 gigs of space left, so I'm not sure why this wouldn't work even if Windows is making some sort of local copy first.

Anybody have any idea? I would rather like to avoid having to build a new VPC image if I can help it.

My goal with this setup is to hopefully get a fast enough drive to run VPC at a reasonable clip on my laptop. On my laptop there's no way I can use VPC for anything useful as it is just dog slow. It takes 2 minutes just to restore a saved image currently. Memory will be another issue, but I do have a gig in this machine so I'm hoping I can rig this all up somehow to run my Whidbey builds in VPC. I'm just too burned out on having my .NET installs trashed by these funky beta/CTP builds that can't clean up after themselves. It seems to me that VS.NET and the .NET framework should be smart enough to clean up previous installs - this is another one of those, Microsoft tells us to do X (ie. isolate our settings) then blissfully violates all their own rules...

The Voices of Reason

Jeroen
February 23, 2005

# re: Not enough disk space?

Since it is preformatted, it is most likely formatted with FAT32.
Convert it to NTFS and try again.

Hank Fay
February 23, 2005

# re: Not enough disk space?

I found VPC dog slow also, until I a) installed the SP1 service pack and b) reinstalled the add-ons. Now I can hardly tell the difference from the underlying machine.

I've read that for best performance, you assign an entire drive as the drive for the VPC (an option in the setup of the Virtual PC). But with the performance I'm geting now, that's really not an issue (of course the underlying drive is an SATA drive, so it's reasonably fast).

Steven Black
February 23, 2005

# re: Not enough disk space?

Another thing outrageous is your 250 GB drive is reporting 250 GB of available space. I have the same Maxtor that when new and after freshly NTFS reformatting reported 237 GB free. So I'd go further than what Jeroen suggests and re-format the drive, not just convert.

**--** Steve

Rick Strahl
February 23, 2005

# re: Not enough disk space?

Even after a full reformat the drive still reports 250 gig. (238 + 12 for the two VPC sessinos I've installed).

They must have gotten tired of people complaining that that the drive is loosing 10 gig or so in the byte 'conversion' count and added some extra data.

This is a One Touch II so maybe that's different?

wOOdy
February 26, 2005

# re: Not enough disk space?

Hi Rick. The maximum filesize for FAT partitions is 2Gb. Since you want to copy a 6Gb file, the FAT-based copy routine just tells you that it can't copy a 6Gb file into a 2Gb maximum file-slot. I admit that the errormessage is somewhat misleading, but remember: 10 years ago: who would ever imagined that you could even create a 6Gb file?

wOOdy

Rick Strahl
February 26, 2005

# re: Not enough disk space?

Fat32 can deal with any size drive and it did. The problems was as pointed out above, that VPC requires an NTFS partition to run and copy the file to. I reformatted to NTFS and all is well (although the drive doesn't feel any faster than the local HD <sigh>).

Franc
March 16, 2005

# re: Not enough disk space?

I had a similar problem when copying a 4Gb file from one drive to another. It appears windows creates a temporary copy of the file before copying it. So you need atleast 6GB free on your windows system disk before you can copy the file anywhere else. I got around the problem by starting an FTP server and ftping the file from one directory to another.

Q-killer
July 17, 2005

# re: Not enough disk space?

wOOdy is somewhat correct. However Fat32 can support files up to 4gb. Something strange happens when files are copied from a network or the internet, since an xp installation on a fat32 disk deals with these files fine. The problem exists primarily when copying directly from ntfs to a fat32 drive.

Peter Bromberg
November 14, 2005

# re: Not enough disk space?

Any time I've run into this "type" of issue, I chunk up the file into nice size pieces with Winrar, copy them over one by one, and then Unrar them back into a single piece on the target drive. You can turn off compression so it goes faster.

DanJonWig
December 25, 2005

# re: Not enough disk space?

Did anyone hear what happened with the lawsuit around the issue of space reported on the box and actual space on the drive? Taking a look at that screen shot, we see that the drive has only just under 234 gig - the same is the case of the drive I got for x-mas today (for the CS dis-inclined, there are 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes in a GB, not 1,000,000,000 as is sometimes believed).

Hansje
August 15, 2006

# re: Not enough disk space?

I had the same problem, after reading this my problem was solved, i was copying a 4GB large disk image from an NTFS disk to a FAT32 disk. I solved it by copying in pieces made by winrar. Thx a lot

Hansje

Alvin
October 04, 2008

# re: Not enough disk space?

Hey guyz i got sort of a problem like this.
Im trying to install a game on my computer, I downloaded the setup from the site and put it on my desktop. when i tried installing it, it stopped installing because it says
"not enough disk space". The game is 993 MB. My c: is FAT32 with 2GB left. and My d: is NTFS with 183GB left. I tried installing on both drives but it wont let me.
Any solution i can do without having to reformatt?

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