99% downloaded, then dead.
 

Greetings!

Apologies if this was recently covered, I tried to find this answer on the board but did not see it.

Am using W2K to download Fedora versions...

FC2-i386-disc1.iso
FC2-i386-disc2.iso
etc.

so that I can write them to disc. Am using mirrored sites. Two sites so far have allowed me to download 99% of the .iso but then it stops with a 'not enough disc space' error. I see that one .iso is 656 MB (or something to that effect) and I have 1.4 GB on the drive. Wondering if I was supposed to use some other program to download, such as bit torrent, etc.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks gang!

Run ScanDisk or a defrag program-- quite often when there is a non-fatal disk error, Windows will misreport the amount of free space on the drive in My Computer.

It would seem that you don't really have 1.4 GB of space, otherwise the file should be copied to the HDD properly.

Are you downloading these one at a time? You don't have enough space to download 2 ISOs at once (what with temp files and all), so if I was you, I'd try downloading one ISO, burning it (in case you don't know, you must use the 'burn image' command in a CD burning program like Nero or EZCD Creator, do not burn the *.iso file as a data file--many people make that mistake), then deleting the *.iso file and downloading another one.

Also download the *.md5 sum of the ISO and use an MD5 checker such as Brad Smtih's Easy MD5 Creator to check the download before burining it-- it would be really painful if you wasted time and media on a corrupt download.

Hope this helps.

Welcome to Windoze
Your mouse has moved...
You must reboot...
OK

The problem is that your W2K part is too small, and you have temp files that need
to be removed from your C: drive before you can get all the download. Windoze is
so utterly brilliant, that even if you tell the system to save the file to F: it's still going
to put it in temp space on C: first. That pisses me off...

So, do this here, okay?

Delete this entire folder ->
C:\WINNT\Windows Update Setup Files
and delete any files in here ->
C:\WINNT\Temp
and that should get you down the road. Since this is from memory, and I might not
have all the right folders, before you start deleting open Windoze Exploder and check
the size of your C: drive - see how much free space you have. Then, after deleting
those files, check it again. If you still don't have enough for the downloads, post back
and I'll find out what I missed.

Umm...Google is your friend ;-)

Thanks very much for your help! Here's what I believe may be the problem -

It appears that when downloading a Linux .ISO to a W2K machine (I'm just using my example here) that if you have less than 15% of your entire C:\ drive unused, Windows decides that the download won't work and lets you reach 99% completion before informing you of this.

Note that the 15% unused could be a large area of space such as in my example, 1.5 G but even though the Fedora .ISO was only about 650 MB, Windows refused the download.

Windows will then tell you to clean up the offending C:\ or remove files (Something to that effect). However, if you attempt to defrag, you can't because the built-in Windows defrag won't defrag if your remaining free space is under 15%. This is where I'm getting my 15% figure from.

So what I did was to remove some files I didn't need and I was lucky in that I noticed my recycle bin was pretty full and that was taking up space as well. One of the replies to my first post mentioned that Windows incorrectly reads the amount of free space on your drive. I believe this to be true and it appears that after cleaning/moving files, only the dreaded reboot so common with Microsoft will allow you to see the true remaining free space on the drive.

I now had more space but I was only able to download one Fedora .ISO at a time as that dreaded free space issue came up again with one .ISO fully downloaded and the second (which I began downloading a minute after the first) went to 99% then dead.

At the time of this writing I found that downloading the Fedora .ISO from a mirror works best and of the mirrors, the locations in the Western U.S. have incredibly fast 300k/second download speeds giving me an entire 650 MB in about 35 minutes.

Last note - Since I was in Windows, I downloaded WinMD5 and placed it in my System32 folder so that I could run it right from the command line. It also works fine as a drag/drop utility.

Again, thanks much for your help; I hope this explanation helps others.

Thank you very much for the explanation. I must say... yet another black mark against Windows. Would it be so very hard for it to just tell you it was going to refuse the download in the first place, rather than making you think it was going to complete (at 99%, one tends to feel pretty confident that the download is going to succeed) before dashing your hopes without telling you why?

Geez.

Nice work, though, putting it all together in a way that makes sense to those of us who can't fathom the thoughts of Windows' design team.... :) .