Scan Disk Error Message

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I was running SCAN DISK for a friend – got an error message saying “the top level folder is full – empty some files and retry.” I have no idea what they are talking about or what to do. HELP.

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You get this message because you have too many files on the root of your drive (note this has nothing to do with their size). Fortunately the solution is easy : gather up some of them and organise them into folders. Put 50 files into 25 folders and your problem will disappear.

Rgds

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Apart from this shortcoming, Scandisk also reportedly has another limitation which one hits if the Hard disk is very large (20GB+) — there are too many files for Scandisk to handle.

It has not happened to me, but to a friend, who says that Scandisk hung up on him, and the same happened when he ran Surface Test. Apparently, the Microsoft Knowledgebase has something on this, but I could not locate it.

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That message is not referring to a limitation of ScanDisk, but to a limitation of the file system on the number of files that can be put into the root directory of any disk partition using the FAT file system. The limit vaires depending on if you have long file names in the root, but is less than 511.

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