I am trying to copy several gigs of jpgs to another hard drive. It gets to about 2.5 gigs then says there is no space left, when there is. I have tried this on a 70GB NTFS partition, and a 120GB FAT32 partition. They are all being copied to a JPEG folder, so its not an issue of too many things in the root directory of a FAT partition...though that should never happen in NTFS. I can touch a file on it, write to it, I just can't copy any more JPEGs.

/dev/hdc1 115G 2.5G 113G 3% /mnt/temp

How many files are you talking about here? Does it fail at the same point every time? At the time of failure a command line this will fail?

cp file1.jpg /mpt/temp

Have you tried creating a sub directory and copying the rest of the files there?

Putting it in another directory works. There must be a cap on the number if files I can put into a folder. I knew there was in FAT32, but I didn't think it existed in NTFS. The trick is now to copy the images that have not already been copied to /mnt/temp/jpg to /mnt/temp/jpg2, but there are so many images, thousands...

I know I could use cp -u to only copy the images that haven't been copied, but how can I do it to a different directory. I used foremost to recover images from a hard drive, so all of the file names are <sector number>.jpg, so it is no small task to just copy the remaining files.

You can try something like this:
It may be much slower than a cp * dest, but it would work. There are alternatives, creating file lists and using xargs, but that would be a few more lines.

Forgot to mention that /dest/new is a previously created directory. If a new directory is not created then all the files will be copied to a new file called new.

thanks, I ended up writing a quick java program to do it for me. That directory would only hold 32342 files, I had 8000 left to copy.