Word 5.1a Not Enough Disk Space Mac OS 9.1

[DarkEnergy]

I was contemplating whether to post this or not for reasons.....

 

I'm trying to install Microsoft Word 5.1a on my iBook running Mac OS 9.1 but have run into an error saying I don't have enough disk space. It says it needs ~22mb and it reports available disk space as -2gb (that's negative). I have 8gb free. I haven't run into this problem installing anything else. Perhaps the installer is broken or maybe it's a mac os bug? I had issues googling this problem.

 

 

[Eigenvektor]

I've seen this issue before with older applications that couldn't handle disks that were too large (or rather too much free space). Basically they calculate the free space e.g. using a 16 bit number and a too large value causes an overflow and results in a negative number. So… try filling up the disk first?

[DarkEnergy]

17 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

I've seen this issue before with older applications that couldn't handle disks that were too large (or rather too much free space). Basically they calculate the free space e.g. using a 16 bit number and a too large value causes an overflow and results in a negative number. So… try filling up the disk first?

I'll give that a shot. It's going to take some time, transfer speeds are less than 1mb/s from usb lol.

[DarkEnergy]

1 hour ago, Eigenvektor said:

I've seen this issue before with older applications that couldn't handle disks that were too large (or rather too much free space). Basically they calculate the free space e.g. using a 16 bit number and a too large value causes an overflow and results in a negative number. So… try filling up the disk first?

That did the trick! Looks like I needed to bring it below 1gb free for it to install.

[Eigenvektor]

57 minutes ago, DarkEnergy said:

That did the trick! Looks like I needed to bring it below 1gb free for it to install.

Glad to hear it worked.

 

I think for me it was the non-Steam version of Fallout 2 when I tried it again several years ago. Free space on my disk was larger than any disk that existed when the game first came out, so it also failed with a ridiculous amount of negative free space (this was on Windows though).

 

Should've mentioned this earlier: I used a command-line tool that can be used to create files of arbitrary size. It only takes a few seconds, since it essentially just creates a file system entry without actually reserving the space. I found the command for macOS, but maybe it already exists on Mac OS 9.1: Quickly create a large file on a Mac OS X system?

[DarkEnergy]

7 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Glad to hear it worked.

 

I think for me it was the non-Steam version of Fallout 2 when I tried it again several years ago. Free space on my disk was larger than any disk that existed when the game first came out, so it also failed with a ridiculous amount of negative free space (this was on Windows though).

 

Should've mentioned this earlier: I used a command-line tool that can be used to create files of arbitrary size. It only takes a few seconds, since it essentially just creates a file system entry without actually reserving the space. I found the command for macOS, but maybe it already exists on Mac OS 9.1: Quickly create a large file on a Mac OS X system?

 

I ended up taking a small ~30mb file and copied it several times into a folder. Then copied that folder several times into another folder, etc to fill up the space. I just discovered that Mac OS 9.1 (and earlier versions) isn't Unix based so there's no terminal.