So anyway, I’m sitting here on my fat ass downloading mp3s and watching anime or whatever. Got the Goemon N64 OGS from Spoony, pretty cool. So I drag the songs over to their own folder, then fire up tagscanner to rename all the files since god knows I’m very anal about my song filenames (just ask, uh, anyone who has ever used my f-serv :P). What happens? 3 of the song filenames are that huge in length, windows can’t fit enough characters in the filenames. It won’t let me rename the things manually, it won’t let me delete them, it won’t even let me move the bloody things. So finally, out of desperation, I go into the command prompt and had to manually delete the files, but accidently blasted the entire folder to all hell in the process.
So uh, yeah. What the hell just happened? I assume I violated the max character limit, but why did Windows act all freaky crazy strange then?
You may be lucky. Exceeding file system specs can be very dangerous. Just be glad that you’ve never experienced having 10000+ files in a single folder in FAT (I don’t thing NTFS has this problem) and literally ruining your hard disk. I had a friend do that when he was fooling around with making viruses. Not fun.
I’ve ahd that problem with the long file names. I download a lot of movies (like I’m downloading LotR, Dark Coty, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights right now). However, some of the past ones I’ve downloaded are inappropirately named if you know what I’ll mean,plus they’ll have all that version/description/bullshit in the file name and it’ll be too long for Windows. However, I’ve actually maanged to delete them after rebooting, giving it some time, trying to delete it constantly, etc. That shit is annoying is hell though.
I don’t know if this is the reason, but some character arrays and strings in the computer have their max limit set. If you exceed that limit you go into the next space, rewriting whatever’s there, even if it had nothing to do with what you were currently doing.
Eample:
You write in the name of a song (first thing that came to mind, don’t judge me!) but you make it too big…it over-writes into the next space. This could cause a chain reaction if that space is important. See below.
[Britney Spears - Tox][icplication Manager]
Now, when you start up Windows and something says “Run Application Manager” it can’t find it, because you renamed it. Well, now you’re screwed.
I’m probably wrong, but that’s all I know about over-flow character input for computers. I hope it did some help, or, at least, was amusing.
Problem is pretty much solved. He uses fat32 on the drive. It is a well known problem that fat32 can’t handle very long filenames. So I’ve given him instructions on how to convert the drive to ntfs.
Luckily I remembered to make a backup of the songs this time.