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I am trying to copy files to a floppy disk but it says it cannot copy even though the
disk is not full
Explanation: You are trying to copy a large number of files to a floppy disk but
you are being told that you are "out of room" or simply not being allowed to
copy more than a certain number to the disk.
Diagnosis: The most common cause of this problem is filling up the root directory
on the disk. The number of files that can be stored in the root directory of any disk is
limited, because the root directory is the only one that cannot be expanded in size. The maximum number of entries depends on the
type of disk but is generally 112 for the double-density drives and 224 for the
high-density drives. The use of long file
names can drastically reduce this number due to the fact that they use up directory
entries to store the long names. (Note that all of this applies to hard disks as well but
rarely is seen on hard disks since most files there are kept in subdirectories; floppies
usually see most of their files in the root directory).
Recommendation:
- Simple solution: create a subdirectory and copy the files there. Subdirectories can be
as large as will fit on the disk.
- Avoid the use of long file names, especially in the root directory.
- Consolidate the files into an archive, through the use of a utility like PKZIP. This
also gives significant performance advantages, since it takes much less time to copy one
large file from/to a floppy than to copy many smaller ones.
- Bear in mind that floppy disks use clusters to store files, just as hard disks do. This
is usually not a problem for floppy disks because the clusters are so small: only 512 or
1024 bytes (whereas hard disk cluster sizes can be as high as 32,768, so there is much
more opportunity for lost space due to
slack there). Still, if you think that you can fit 10,000 files that are only 100
bytes each onto a 1.44 MB floppy disk, you are going to be unpleasantly surprised before
you get even close to halfway done (you can do this again by using an archive like PKZIP).
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