Do i need to defrag or something. Why would it do this and what can i do? Thanks
Well, can you quote the message and let us know the configuration.
For example, you could have your OS with the temp dirs, common files, and swap file on C: with no extra space and 4 GB free on D:…
Does it say low resources? or some such?
i am running everything on one hard drive -> C. I get a message when im trying to dl something “You have run out of free disk space on drive C…” Then it starts up the disk cleanup program. But when I look at the drive in MY Computer, it says I have 4.3 gigs free. I run win98 and have a 13 gig hard drive.
Sounds like a fragmentation problem to me, but I’ve been wrong before. Do you allow the cleanup utility to run? If not, then give it a try. When that’s done, run the defrag utility.
Windows has a setting which will make it give you this message whenever you have less than a certain percentage of your overall space on that partition free.
I believe that in XP the default is 15%… thus if I have less than 6 GB free out of my 40 GB (example) hard disk drive, I would receive that message.
If you are using NT, 2000, or XP, there is a bug in the way drive space is reported. Every 4 gigs it rolls back to zero, like an odometer without enough digits. So if you have 4 gigs and 78 kilobytes free, the OS will report that you have 78 K available.
This info courtesy of the help desk folks at QualComm, whom we contacted when Eudora started giving my girlfriend the “disk space” error message. I’m a Mac user so, having no reason to doubt this report, took it at face value and changed the swap disk settings to use the D drive instead. No more error messages (I guess the available disk space on that drive just doesn’t happen to closely approximate an even multiple of 4 gigs?).
In other words, the accuracy of this report has not been verified although some corroborating information would seem to exist.
I have a machine at work with a 100+ gigabyte NTFS partition (2000 Server), and I have not seen the overflow bug that AHunter3 is talking about. And my external USB drive at home (FAT on 2000 Pro) is 120G and it doesn’t do this either.
My intuition would be file system damage, especially on Win98. Run Scandisk.
This happened to me not too long ago. Windows Explorer would tell me I had 3 GB of free space, but when I tried to copy a file I got an error message that I had only something like 500K free.
Turns out I had a ~3 GB chunk of disk space that had been somehow garbled into an unusable state, and when I ran Scandisk it reported that. (It wasn’t physically bad, i.e. no permanent damage to the drive, it was just full of junk data.) I deleted the file and everything went back to normal.
I ran into something similar a while back- it turned out to be that I had blown past the maximum number of files allowable in a given directory.
I had something like 3 gigs free, but kept getting “out of disk space” errors. Once I shifted some files out of that directory, everything’s kosher again.
Hmm… I’ve seen this problem with some older programs, but I’ve never gotten this report wrong with the OS itself. The main problem I get this with is Adobe Deluxe Home Edition 3.0. It think it’s probably because it wasn’t designed to run on windows NT or 2000. So is it really an OS problem or is it a software problem? I’d think they would have fixed it in 2000 if it was a known problem in NT. I’ll bet Eudora is using a 16bit API to report the disk space, which works great on Windows 9x, but not so good on a 32 bit system.
Did you try Windows update? There are a few updates for W98.