Ok, maybe it's just me, but I'm confused. I found the portable suite package, which says it fits on a 256Mb drive. And it should - according to windows, the entire extracted package is 214Mb. But when I extract it to my USB drive, I keep getting an out of space error.
I checked the size of my USB drive in windows (right click on properties, see general tab) and it says the drive is 244Mb (which is 256,507,904 bytes) which is correct, and which should (tightly) accomodate 214Mb of data.
I tried both extracting from the zip directly to the USB drive, and then extracting the files first to my C:\ drive and attempting to copy them over. Both fail - I get an "out of space" error.
Has anyone else run into this problem? Any suggestions?
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I have not found a solution to the problem. I tried both methods as you did to no avail. I ended up having to use to flash drives. One has the Suite minus the OpenOffice.org and the other is hosts the OpenOffice.org Suite. Hope someone knows what is going on.
I was wondering if maybe windows was doing something funky, like using part of the drive as *.tmp space during the copy, etc. So I switched to a linux machine and tried to do the same thing, and got the same problem - it ran out of space about halfway through.
I checked the properties on the drive again - it is formatted as FAT, no FAT32 or NTFS. I read on other sites that FAT is the correct one to use, but who knows? Maybe I need FAT32 for long filename support? I wonder if that has anything to do with it?
Just thinking out loud...
-Todd Davis
Problem solved. Against the clear advice of the manufacturer reccomending that I *not* reformat the flash drive...
I reformatted the flash drive. In FAT32 as opposed to FAT.
And boom - now it works just fine. I'm not sure if this will work for everyone, but it's worth a shot, especially if you have a flagrant disregard for authority.
-Todd Davis
This page details the differing cluster sizes on FAT, FAT32 and NTFS drives.
Note that FAT typically uses twice the size per cluster, meaning that a 1byte file on a FAT drive needs a whole cluster (say 4KB) whilst the same file on FAT32, still using a whole cluster, would not park in so much disk space (2KB in this example).
This is partly true for larger files - a 7KB file is likely to need 8KB of disk space, just because of how the space is allocated.
So the moral of this is that the typically small compressed files that portable apps have are only as small as your file system will allow. However some devices (I presume some digital cameras) will only understand FAT, making reformatting a concern in those cases. For memory sticks, I see no reason not to go for FAT32 (NTFS would defeat the portability if you end up in Win9x...).
Glad you got it sorted, down with instruction manuals!