"No space left on device" error

[gordonfreemanjr]

I'm preparing my Retropie/Raspberry Pi 4 machine. I'm storing the roms on a 2TB external drive, which I've formatted to FAT32, as the instructions indicated.

I have a full ZX Spectrum library, which I intended to put in the Spectrum roms folder. The problem is, I can't seem able to fit all of them in a single folder, receiving the "no space left on device" error on both Ubuntu 18.04 and Win 10. Granted, there's A LOT of them, but still - what do I do? Is there any way?

Thx

[Clyde]

@gordonfreemanjr And there's not just no space left on the drive overall, I guess?

If not, you don't happen to have 65,534 files in that directory or 268,435,437 files overall on the disk? Those are the limits of the FAT32 file system.

[gordonfreemanjr]

There's over 1TB left on the device. As for the files in the folder, as for the moment, the number is 12 022 and just won't go up.

[Norm]

Hi @gordonfreemanjr
I'm new here so not hugely familiar with the way the forum works - can you post screenshots of what you're doing please?
Other useful things to see would be outputs from commands executed on your device:

mount
df -h

Cheers

[Clyde]

Another interesting output may come from this command:

touch /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/zxspectrum/test

This will create an empty file in the Spectrum rom directory to see if you can create any files at all there. If there's no error message, you can remove the file again with

rm /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/zxspectrum/test

That said, can you create files in any other directory?

[gordonfreemanjr]

Right now I have the roms stored on the 2TB drive, which has not been yet connected with the RPi, as I’m preparing files and getting them in order. Therefore, the files are not yet in RetroPie/roms/zxspectrum folder, but I don’t think it’s a huge difference, as I’m going to run them from the same external drive, just different folder (retropie-mount/etc).

Still, I wanted all the Spectrum roms in the same folder eventually (roms/zxspectrum), and it seems I won’t be able to.

@Clyde Yes, I can. I have just added several PSX roms to a different folder on the same drive

[Clyde]

Please show us in a codeblock the output of the commands that @Norm gave you, when the drive is mounted in Ubuntu or Retropie (they are Linux commands, so no point to enter them in Win 10).

What did you do exactly in both systems, step by step? E.g. which tools did you use to copy the roms onto the drive?

Can you save your Spectrum collection in any other directory? Can you save it partly in the directory/ies that you can't save it completely in?