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file access - win98 to XP

pierre_pierre
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Registered: ‎30-07-2007

file access - win98 to XP

I have an old Win 98 program that writes  a backup to the hard disc (or any other place) every 10 uses, I am in the process of scrapping the old machine and have ported it across to a new XP machine.
The program works OK and is writing to the working directory, but when it comes to the Backup it says that the Hard disc is full  18.7 GB free out of 37.2 GB.  I am not in trouble because I am writing to a USB Pen, no trouble.  Just curious, has the Old Win program reached the Win file size limit?.  I.E it is trying to write to location over 18 GB? Crazy
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pjemmanuel
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Re: file access - win98 to XP

It's not likely to be the win file size limit, a FAT formatted disk (which win98 will use) has a file size limit of 4GB, unless of course your backup file has just hit the 4GB size limit.
It may just be the way the program is misreading the available space on the drive. When programs are written, they are not usually "future proof" - think millennium bug - and the programmer may have hard coded a size limit into the program and the "free space" reading from the drive is "over flowing".
Think about an 8bit binary word, the largest number you can store is 256 and if you try to put 258 into it, you end up with 2 in there instead. This may be what is happening, obviously on a larger scale when the program is reading the space remaining on the disk/USB and thinks there is nothing left, I've encountered a few older programs myself that have the same problem.
This may sound stupid, but copy a folder on to the drive, with say 1 or 2GB of files in it, see if the program can now save to the disk (USB pen). Sometimes you have to try different amounts of "packing" on a disk to fool the program into thinking there is still space there.
pierre_pierre
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Re: file access - win98 to XP

The total file size of the three files is Data file 3170 kb, and two index files 25kb and 63 kb, I think that the files have a suffix ,null,1, 2 and 3 for four separate backups, the files are renumbered on  each backup, total folder size 12 MB, there is also a small file that is probably the temp file during renumbering ~QW~link.qdt
pjemmanuel
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Re: file access - win98 to XP

In which case, it is almost certain that the program is misinterpreting the free size of the drive because of an overflow - the file sizes you state are nowhere near the limit for FAT.
Usually, the only way to fix this sort of thing is either to remove some files from the drive, or, as I've already mentioned and counter intuitively to add files to the drive so that the program "sees" more free space.
Otherwise, you may need to find another program to do the task, if that's viable.
pierre_pierre
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Re: file access - win98 to XP

as I said at the beginning, I am not worried as the files write to a 1GB stick quiet happily, I was just curious
HPsauce
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Re: file access - win98 to XP

Silly question, but is the disk NTFS (on XP it should be)?
pierre_pierre
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Re: file access - win98 to XP

Yes, its alright, I am generally 3 spanners type, just curious
HPsauce
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Re: file access - win98 to XP

Crazy meaning?
It's just that if it's NTFS the program may not cope with it properly for all functions as it was presumably written for a FAT environment with (probably) no knowledge of NTFS  Lips_are_sealed
pierre_pierre
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Re: file access - win98 to XP

it was suggested that we should have spanners beneath our avator  a few weeks back to indicate our level of knowledge, me been mucking around with computer since about 1970, but packed up work in 96 and are a but rusty.  The thoughts were dropped as a person might know about DVD and Games but nought about memory.
pjemmanuel
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Re: file access - win98 to XP

Quote from: HPsauce
It's just that if it's NTFS the program may not cope with it properly for all functions as it was presumably written for a FAT environment with (probably) no knowledge of NTFS  Lips_are_sealed

You wouldn't normally write an application to suit a particular file system, you should leave that kind of thing to the operating system. Unless you are going to do something clever at sector or cluster level, such as a defragmenting program, you would normally just use system calls to load and save files.
The reason being that when you get down as far as the file system level there are differences between USB flash memory, hard disk, floppy disk etc. Any program should only really work with files - leave the operating system and drivers worry about things like the file system and the physical device. When a program is coded in this way, it makes little difference - FAT, FAT32, NTFS, ext2 and so on.
But, as pierre_pierre mentions - it's only curiosity anyway.