OS 9.22: Why Bizarre Inadequate space message on Ext. Drive ?

Question

OS 9.22: Why Bizarre Inadequate space message on Ext. Drive ?

Guess I've lost my OS 9.22 skills.

This is the G4 PPC half-basketball iMac running OS 9.22. Internal Drive 60 GB with only 13 GB used. I just wanted to copy the entire drive over by dragging over the hard drive to a 750 GB external USB platter drive formatted MacOS Extended.

So after the Finder counted the 418,618 files the Finder announced:

"Not enough room in the external drive. 2,885.77 GB is needed"

Huh ? What ? Was only copying 13 GB to this 750 GB drive.

Why did this happen ? This erroneus message must be an OS limitation. Will making a 100 GB partition on the EHD then copying the 13 GB to the 100 GB partition solved this ?

Thank you.

Posted on Mar 13, 2014 12:53 AM

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Answer 1

Jeff

Level 6

12,058 points

Mar 13, 2014 7:17 AM in response to MacPcConsultant

There's no OS 9 limitation on a volume that size (check out this article). I'd recommend that you copy the hard drive's contents by folder, starting with the System folder, then Applications, Documents, etc. Because you have an iMac that boots into OS 9, it has the very slow USB 1.1 bus. An external HDD that connects via FireWire would provide a much faster transfer, if you're going to be working with older Macs lacking USB 2.0.

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Answer 2

Mar 13, 2014 8:56 AM in response to Jeff

Thank you.

So you mean my dragging over the internal hard drive icon on the external drive exceeded the 32k limit of files/folders ? So you think that had I opened the internal drive icon and selected/dragged all the files and folders free onto the external drive that erroneus message would not have appeared ?

How can almost 3,000 GB be needed ? Can you explain this error message ?

From your link:

Maximum number of files/folders in a
folder

32,767

Yes, FW400 is faster but I didn't have a FW drive with me at the time. A FW drive would not have stopped this error message. She also is using only OS 9, even through Mac OS X is on the drive, so I could just copy over the OS 9 system folder and related material.

Could also use Target mode and use FW to copy to a Mac laptop.

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