thumb drive limits?

[homer15]

a guy at my work uses a thumb drive (128 mb's) instead of floppies. it took me forever to get him to get rid of floppies, and now that he finally switched over to a thumb drive, he's having problems. he was getting a permission error when trying to save documents to the root folder. i noticed he had about 150 docs in the root... i made a folder and moved some of his 2003 stuff into, and magically i was able to save to the root again. is there a limit on the number of files allowed in each folder? or is it space limited or something?

[TwoRails]

I think you're right, homer15. In the days of DOS, there was a limit to how many file could be in the root directory, and it sounds like it's the same for thumb drives.

[glc]

If the thumb drive is formatted FAT, there's a definite limit on the root.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;EN-US;120138

[homer15]

does anyone know if it's possible to reformat the thumb drives? i told the guy to come up with a better organization system than just dumping everything into the root folder.

[scott_d]

I formatted my 128 mb pen drive in FAT32 with no troubles. It wont let you do NTFS though.

[glc]

Format it like you would a floppy or any other removable disk.

When I first read your post, Scott, it didn't look right. In Win9x, fdisk would not give you the FAT32 option if the drive was smaller than 512mb, but I see the standard right click/format option in 2K/XP gives you 3 choices - FAT, FAT32, and NTFS. I just tried it on my 64mb pen drive, it did FAT32 no problem. I believe that this will relax the root restrictions, but it won't be compatible with operating systems that don't support FAT32.

[homer15]

i don't think that's a problem. he's got windows 2000 here and windows 98se at home. thanks guys.

[glc]

Then he needs to format it in the Win2K box - the 98 box won't do it FAT32 because it's under 512mb.