'Insufficient memory' error writing to CF card

[skydiveaff]

I was recently attempting to install a large (~40 MB) program to my Toshiba e755 using the 1G SanDisk CF card installed on it (~900 MB free :!: ) and mid-way through the installation progress bar on my desktop, the installation stopped and gave a message stating that there was insufficient memory on the mobile device (...delete programs to free space, blah blah). Has anyone else encountered this error? I checked the CF card and found roughly 16 MB of the installation packet had been written to it, but obviously the install was halted before the program itself was installed. I retried the installation using the SD card also in the unit and it worked fine.

Any ideas on what might be going on? Is there a form of regular maintenance (ie defragging) the external memory cards on PDAs that I'm not aware of? I have previously tried SoftWinter's 'Storage tools' to defrag/repair my CF card, but all of the program associations got deleted and I had to wipe the card and start from scratch... so I'm not sure that's the answer. :devilboy:

Any help would be most appreciated!

[PetiteFlower]

Well even when you install to a storage card some files are written to the device's memory. How much free Ram do you have?

[skydiveaff]

I'm currently only using 11MB of the 64 MB of built in RAM. The 'baseline' memory usage for programs is ~10MB, so I think I've got enough spare memory to install the whole program in built in memory, much less onto the external card. I'm not using any of the flash ROM (32 MB), either. Seems a mystery to me!

[Raynne]

How many folders/files do you have in the root directory? I discovered once when transferring e-books that there is a limit to the number of files you can have in the root directory. So once I created an e-book folder and moved them all in there, everything was fine.

[Janak Parekh]

Any ideas on what might be going on? Is there a form of regular maintenance (ie defragging) the external memory cards on PDAs that I'm not aware of?
Do you have a desktop reader? If so, stick it in there and run a CHKDSK/Scandisk just to make sure there's no corruption. That's all you should have to do...

--janak

[skydiveaff]

Thanks for the help! At this point I haven't tried to reinstall the program to the CF card (you know 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'), but I appreciate the troubleshooting. Thanks Janak for that tip about using the desktop reader. Somehow that didn't even cross my mind, and it's exactly what I meant when asking about maintenance on the cards.

Re Raynne's comment: I do have a good number of folders in the root directory on the card, but if I try to move them, they lose their association with the programs that utilize them. I run a lot of programs on my PDA and not much actual data (like ebooks, music, pics, etc), so I'm not sure I can muck around with the files too much. It seems to always get me in trouble!

Thanks again for the advice!