Disk full, but its not!

[Dr J]

I am trying to set up an old Dell Desktop (233mghrz Pentium II) to help with home schooling a couple of my grandkids. It is working well with the mid 90's software "edutainment" programs that I have installed so far. I have loaded 6 programs on a 20 meg hard drive ( along with some other stuff) and everything shows the drive to be less than half full i.e., 7 gig used and 13 gig remaining. BUT as I try to load other programs, I am getting an error message saying that the disk is full. I have reset the drivers on this disk and checked its condition with all the tools that I have available to me - every thing seems to be fine with the drive! Any ideas as to why an apparently half full drive won't allow more programs to be installed? Thanks in advance for any help!

[myrddinb]

It might be this is a program that is so old it is from the days of very small hard drives and when even windows needed LBA to be able use all the space on a hard drive such that even though it is not full, this program thinks it is because it is just looking at the first x amount of space and not the whole drive.

You could also try running a defrag - then run it again.

[Dr J]

Thanks myrddinb! I think you may be on the right track. It does seem to be the old programs of a certain company - several did the same thing. Other programs are working fine now. Thanks for your quick reply !