Question: Why can't I fill my ZIP/Jaz drive to it's rated capacity??

  The reason is, most likely, that you are trying to copy a LARGE number of files (possibly over 500) to the root directory (Z:\).

Unfortunately, the root directory is fixed in size in the FAT12 (floppies, Hard Drive partitions less than 17M) and FAT 16 formats. The typical limit is 512 for hard drives and the ZIP/Jaz drives. HPFS, NTFS and FAT32 have expandable root directories. Once you fill up all the entries, that's it. You will get all sorts of weird, uninformative messages.

  The fix is to create a subdirectory (Z:\MyFiles), and place the files in there. Subdirectories are treated like files, and can expand as needed. Better yet, create multiple subdirectories, and break up the files into better categories. If you've already run into a disk full problem, you may need to move or delete a few files from the root directory first. Ideally, there should be NO files in the root directory of any drive, only directories.

  If you use long filenames under Win95/98/NT, or use lower-case names, then things get even worse. A single file will use MULTIPLE directory entries to hold the name. The first entry has the 'short' filename (for example, 'PROGRA~1' for 'Program Files') and a pointer to another directory entry containing the first part of the real name. If the full real name doesn't fit in that entry, it points to yet another entry, up to 255 characters total, or up to 20 directory entries! Each entry can hold only 13 characters. A long filename is any name containing lower-case letters, more than one period, more than 8 characters before a period (or more than 8 characters without a period), or more than 3 characters after a period. It seems odd, but if you name a file 'MyFile.txt', that is considered a long filename. The short name is 'MYFILE.TXT' (all uppercase).

  Why is this suddenly popping up? Floppies usually held too little to run into this problem, even though their root directories are smaller. I think alot of people don't realize that any 'drive' can have subdirectories, even floppies.

  FAQ by Andrew Rossmann, v2.00, Dec 31 1998