Well, I have actually had this exact problem recently, on a Win98 machine ! (Pentium4)

On which there were some errors(?) in the file/storage information, over-reporting how much free space there really was, so that my almost full disk was actually FULL before I knew it.
Now, these errors happen on a regular basis with win98 it seems, but I've always managed to scan the disk before it got too bad. Not this time though.

Granted, that day I was living with just a 34-40mb free on a 80gb disk (!), due to heavy internet use(man, those temp files etc), and was just about to go delete some stuff, when everything totally locked up due to zero _actual_ space left!!
As the garbage bin need some space for where to put what you delete, apparantly... even when you change the settings to instant delete. (or am I mistaken?)

Had to remove the whole physical disk and connect it to a different computer, so I could finally delete something via that one.... :\

So, I'm now making sure to both do disc scans more often - to correct the file tables or whatever, and not filling it up as much as before... 🤣 😜

Make sure to set your temp internet files space to 250MB or lower in Windows.

Some of the earlier versions of Windows (up till at least XP) would default to some ungodly amount that didn't even make any sense.

Is there a way to just, not have Temporary Internet Files at all? I know in Firefox via about:config you can set it to the point there's absolutely no disk cache permitted. It can either be set to remain resident in RAM instead or just not have a cache whatsoever.

It also wouldn't surprise me considering how hap-hazard FAT is as a filesystem that this kind of thing eventually happens. Though I thought MS-DOS had no concept of a "Recycle Bin" and all that "UNDELETE" did was try to find parts of the filesystem that were marked "deleted" and attempt to recover it if it wasn't already overwritten by further operations.

The only way I could think of this happening is if you were using a strange version of DOS that always wrote directory changes to new clusters and then freed the old ones, instead of just overwriting them.

Kinda sounds like the kinda thing doublespace might say.

Shagittarius wrote:

Kinda sounds like the kinda thing doublespace might say.

My thoughts as well.