Re: Strange `No space left' on usb pendrive
On 2010-09-19 10:26 +0200, Rodolfo Medina wrote:
> When I try to copy more than 40MB onto an empty new 2GB usb pendrive, I get an
> inexplicable `No space left on device' error message:
>
>
> `11022008699.jpg' -> `/mnt/pendrive-carolina2/11022008699.jpg'
> `11022008700.jpg' -> `/mnt/pendrive-carolina2/11022008700.jpg'
> cp: cannot create regular file `/mnt/pendrive-carolina2/11022008700.jpg': No space left on device
> `11022008701.jpg' -> `/mnt/pendrive-carolina2/11022008701.jpg'
> cp: cannot create regular file `/mnt/pendrive-carolina2/11022008701.jpg': No space left on device
>
>
> The command df seems to show that everything is all right:
>
> $ df -lh
> Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda6 11G 9.2G 912M 92% /
> tmpfs 110M 0 110M 0% /lib/init/rw
> udev 10M 80K 10M 1% /dev
> tmpfs 110M 0 110M 0% /dev/shm
> /dev/hda1 7.8G 7.3G 541M 94% /mnt/hda1
> /dev/hda7 4.9G 1.9G 2.7G 42% /mnt/hda7
> /dev/hda8 4.9G 3.4G 1.3G 74% /mnt/hda8
> /dev/hda9 7.9G 2.7G 4.9G 36% /mnt/hda9
> /dev/sda1 1.9G 40M 1.9G 3% /mnt/pendrive-carolina2
>
>
> and so parted:
>
> # parted /dev/sda1
> GNU Parted 1.7.1
> Using /dev/sda1
> Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
> (parted) p
>
> Disk /dev/sda1: 2004MB
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> Partition Table: loop
>
> Number Start End Size File system Flags
> 1 0.00kB 2004MB 2004MB fat16
>
>
> Please help understand what the problem may be. Should I format the device?
Not necessarily (unless you want a better filesystem), but you should
create some subdirectories and move files there. FAT16 has a rather low
limit of directory entries for the root directory¹, and you're hitting
that.
Switching to FAT32 will avoid that and also waste less disk space, since
the cluster size gets reduced to 4 KiB from 32 KiB with FAT16.
Sven
¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat16#Final_FAT16
Reply to: