I have a SanDisk Cruzer 16GB USB Flash Drive. I have been saving quite a number of pics on this thing for several months now. For the last couple of days, however, when I try to save a pic, it is giving me the message “This location on disk E: is full” – which is odd, when I can look on my computer and find that there is “6.8 GB free out of 14.9 GB” available on the device ( “disk E:” ). What is going on?
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance for any info that you can give me!
Some clone companies make fake brand name drives and get larger prices by selling 8 gig drives (or whatever size) as 16’s and having the chip on the drive report a higher available space to the PC which reads it as a 16 even thought there is only half that space available.
If you bought the drive in a large retail store this scenario is unlikely and might just be a malfunctioning drive.
Either way get your pics off it ASAP since it looks like the logic is goofed up.
Flash drives are the tools of the Horned Devile and should all be set afire.
Burn 'em up!( after you get your stuff off.)
depending on how you structured the drive and its format you may have reached the limit for number of files.
I bought it at WalMart. I guess it is malfuctioning, then.
Maybe not. Copy all your pix to someplace safe, then reformat the thumb drive as NTFS (you may need to google for help, as Microsoft makes this as hard as possible). This will wipe out any junk software that came with the drive (absolutely useless) and allow you to store files larger than 2 GB (probably not important unless you are saving video). NTFS is totally compatible with XP and later, but older Mac computers might have a problem with it.
Check the available file space, which should match what you expect within 15% (overhead, etc.).
Then copy your files back to the thumbdrive. See if this works.
That could very well be it, especially if it’s formatted FAT32 (which I assume it is) and the OP is using long file/folder names.
The file size limit is 4GB as well, but I assume s/he isn’t trying to save a 4GB+ photo.
Are you putting the files in the root directory or a subdirectory. I beleive there is still a limit to the number of files that can be stored in the root directory.
Yes, another item I didn’t think about. And I’d like to correct my 2GB file limit to 4GB.
Both problems will be solved if you reformat the thumbdrive as NTFS.
It’s important to remember that error messages are rarely accurate. Very little effort is put into them during development, and not all situations can be anticipated in advance. The “insufficient space” message is a catchall that might mean many things, most of which have nothing to do with insufficient space. All it means is the software developer, some years ago, was in a hurry to collect his paycheck, get to Happy Hour, and move on to a better job without looking back. And his employer was only looking for immediate sales, not long-term consequences of unforeseen events.
Prior to NTFS, that was the case. 512 was the max at one time, and the error message for violating that was “no space available.” Sound familiar?
How do you check to see how it is formatted? I didn’t do any formatting – I just started saving pics as jpegs to the drive. Sorry for the ignorance!
These drives come already formatted and with junk software that executes upon insertion (bad idea!). IMHO, this software is worse than worthless (if you just want to store data on a drive, you don’t need any special software, they just want to sell you stuff).
You can format a thumb drive the same way you format a hard drive. One of the options offered is the file system. Select NTFS if you can, and I suggest the largest possible cluster size rather than default. If NTFS isn’t available, it’s due to another obscure setting, and that’s where it gets complicated. Googling it may be the best option, and your choices may be dependent on the OS you are using to format it, which is why I decline to give step-by-step instructions.
Okay, thanks. I will figure out how to do it, eventually. I’m not much of a techie, as you can tell. Ha!
have the drive in and then use a file manager ‘my computer’, or ‘computer’ in Windows. right click on that drive and it will show you the format.
copy all the contents to a hard drive or DVD first.
No, it won’t. Clicking on “format” begins a new format procedure. What you see is what you will get, but not what exists.
Clicking on Properties will not show the existing format.
This pertains to XP. I don’t know about other OSes.
However, I can pretty much assure you that an off-the-shelf thumb drive is going to be FAT32. Two reasons: compatible with Mac, and because of ancient (>12 years ago) hardware compatibility. A FAT32 drive works in most places, but will not work for >4GB files. >4GB files are mostly seen in high-end video productions, so the manufacturers are pretty safe.
Yes clicking on ‘Properties’ will show you the existing format.
my thinking and typing didn’t match.
It does NOT on my XP SP2. What is the path you are using? (specific tab, etc.)
My Computer -> select drive & R click -> select ‘Properties’ and there in the General tab it gives the File System
My apologies for doubting you. For some of my drives, it does. For some, it says “RAW”, which is not a file system I am familiar with, so I assume that is some kind of default fallback.
RAW can be bare naked uncompressed camera data.
In my experience, these type of drives will not give an error when writing. It will happily let you write the claimed capacity and only tell you there’s a problem when you try to read the data back. This is much worse.