SD card 35% full, no space left

pickarooney · 02-01-2008 12:07am #1

I got a 2GB memory card to store music on for listening to in my car stereo. When I bought it, there were a load of junk files on there, some kind of maps of Europe or whatnot. Naturally enough I chucked them off and started filling the card with MP3s. When I got to 35% full, copying stopped, saying there was no space left on the device. In my file manager and bash there's over a Gig left, but yet I can't copy anything over. I thought there must be some hidden .trash folder but couldn't find one, so I formatted the card (to vfat) with mkfs and was then able to copy over as much as I liked.

However, the stereo was unable to read any files from the card. I deleted all but one file - same result.

So, I used my digital camera to format the card this time. The camera reckons there's 2 GB of space on there, as does the PC, but once again I can't copy more than about 700MB of data onto it before I run out of space.

What's going on?

df -i for this disk gives me

/dev/sdb1                  0       0       0    -  /media/disk

by the way. No inodes at all apparently.

AndrewMc · 02-01-2008 11:47am

pickarooney wrote: »
df -i for this disk gives me
/dev/sdb1                  0       0       0    -  /media/disk
by the way. No inodes at all apparently.

Can you type "mount" and see what type of filesystem it is?

Khannie · 02-01-2008 1:16pm

Where did you buy this memory card from?

Capt'n Midnight · 03-01-2008 9:35pm

If it was formatted as FAT16 then you would have 65 thousand 64KB clusters.

So if each file was one byte you would only be able to store 65KB on that disk.

Unlikely if just mp3 files unless you had lots of tiny little files with them

what does the command line say when you type
df

leeroybrown · 03-01-2008 9:49pm

pickarooney wrote: »
df -i for this disk gives me
/dev/sdb1                  0       0       0    -  /media/disk
by the way. No inodes at all apparently.

You won't get any listed for a FAT filesystem (typically fat16 for small memory devices).

pickarooney · 05-01-2008 1:23pm

I think it's a limitation of the file system. It's vfat when formatted by the camera, but that could be FAT16, in which case the long filenames and lack of sub-directories would partially explain the fact the device is seen as full.
Making subdirs has allowed me to copy more stuff over, so that's my workaround at least.
Also, driving 10 minutes to and from work a few times a week I'll be a while before even a GB of music loops around

SD card 35% full, no space left

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