Disk Full Error

When Jim chooses to save his documents, he's constantly getting an error message saying that the disk is full and that he needs to free some space on the drive. This is aggravating because there is plenty of space (1.2 TB) left on the drive. Jim wonders what could be causing the problem.

There are a couple of reasons why this message could be happening. The first thing to check out is related to Windows and not to Word. This can take a bit of explaining, and it has to do with where you may be trying to save the documents. If you are trying to save them in the root folder of the drive, then it is very possible that Windows is reporting the drive is full, even when there is space available on the drive. This, however, will realistically only be the case if all three of these conditions are met:

1. the drive is an external one, such as a USB flash drive
2. the drive is formatted using the FAT or FAT16 file formats
3. you are saving the documents into the root folder of that drive

These very, very old file formats impose a limit on how many files can be stored in the root folder—something like only 128 files. When you hit that limit, then Windows will report that the disk is full, even if there is a ton of space still left on the drive. This isn't the case with built-in drives on modern computers because they don't use the older FAT or FAT16 file systems, like is more often done with external drives.

The solution is to either move files out of the root folder and into a subfolder or, better still, reformat the drive to use a better file format. If you want to find out some more detail about the limits imposed by different file systems, then I suggest you check out this page on Leo Notenboom's website:

https://askleo.com/is-there-a-limit-to-what-a-single-folder-or-directory-can-hold/

If you determine that the problem isn't with the file format used on your drive, then you can start to look at potential issues within Word itself. It is possible that your Normal template is corrupted and it is causing "false reporting" of the drive being full. (Yeah, I know that sounds strange. Go figure!) To see if this is potentially the issue, get out of Word, find and rename the Normal.dotm file to OldNormal.dotm, and restart Word. If you can now save documents without the error cropping up, then you can be pretty sure that the Normal template (now named OldNormal.dotm) is the culprit.

Finally, it could be that something has gone haywire with your installation of Word. Either install any updates to Word that may be pending or fix the installation following the instructions on this page:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/repair-an-office-application-7821d4b6-7c1d-4205-aa0e-a6b40c5bb88b

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13153) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.