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Root Directory Limitations
Authored by: jamesstewart on Jul 29, '02 11:38:34AM

Speaking of zip drive oddities, I haven't had a chance to test this for a mac, however I do recall that Win based zip disks have a limit to the number of files that can be in the root directory. It was odd to see your zip drive full with less than 10 mb on it. Moving the files to a folder allowed me to fill it. I wonder if this limitation also is on DOS formatted Zip disks used on a mac.



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Root Directory Limitations
Authored by: CaptCosmic on Jul 29, '02 12:56:18PM

The limit to the number of files in the root directory goes all the way back to DOS on the PCs. If I remember correctly, originally, DOS (or more precisely, FAT) wouldn't allow more than 128 entries in the root directory. It was actually less once you accounted for the volume name and such.

This limit existed since in FAT, the root directory is a fixed size and at a fixed location on the disk. Since subdirectories existed out on the disk itself, they could be arbitrarily large. Because of the nature of the FAT file system, this limit existed not only on floppy disks, but also on hard drives. I'm not sure when the limit was raised or removed, but I ran into it more than once.



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Root Directory Limitations
Authored by: a1291762 on Jul 29, '02 07:15:45PM

The limit was 'removed' with FAT32 (available in Win95 OSR2, Win98 and all newer versions).

If the disk formatted for FAT or FAT32? It's likely formatted as FAT because I think FAT32 has a minimum size of ~500MB. You might be able to override that but by default that's what happens (from memory at least).

Making a subdirectory to store everything in is easy enough.



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