I currently use a very old version of Logic Audio 5.5 for Windows to record music. I'm using such an old program because I got used to it, way back when they were still making it for Windows. It has successfully served me fine up until now.

But after I upgraded my system to a 2TB SSD hard drive recently, it now refuses to record audio to that drive, saying "Drive C: is full". I can record to smaller drives, just not that one. I think this old Windows program which was originally written in an old old C compiler (probably Borland or something ) is making a call to the Windows API which is return a number that overflows some old 16-bit integer and causes this thing to think it's got negative disk space.

Problem is, Drive C is where I store everything including my audio recording projects. And I've got a recording session coming up on Saturday and basically zero available time to troubleshoot this between now and then.

Each of the following options are things which would solve the problem, but I can't or won't do them right now for various reasons:

- Put previous smaller 1TB SSD hard disk back into PC.
- Switch to more modern recording software on Windows
- Switch my audio workstation to an Apple computer with new modern Logic Audio version.
- Record to a smaller USB drive (audio interface is USB and I don't want to saturate I/O, and, it screws up my project paths anyway)

Does anyone know if there's a quick and dirty way to fake out the program so that it thinks the drive C: disk is smaller than it is? Some kind of wrapper program, or registry setting? (Note: Program is already being launched as "Run this program in compatibility mode for Windows XP Service Pack 2" in the icon properties).

Some things I'm thinking of trying:
- Filling up the drive with a single giant file (anyone know how to do that quickly without having to actually write every byte to the file)? Not sure if that would even work; not sure if the error is due to overall disk size or due to available space size.
- Briefly reducing the partition size of drive C: on the fly (I always consider this risky when I'm doing it on my OS partition and I'm afraid to do it).

Wondering what disk size and/or free space size in Windows is one that is likely to trigger old programs to have rollover/overflow problems with their disk space calculations? This would inform me of how much to reduce the space if that were the case. Right now it says total capacity: 1,999,844,179,968 bytes, free space: 1,101,474,160,640 bytes. Wonder how much to reduce that to make the program stop whining?

Plugging the numbers into Windows Calc in "Programmer" mode...

I see that total disk size, when reduced to a DWORD size, overflows and turns into a negative number. Free disk space size, when reduced to a DWORD, becomes an incorrect value but it stays positive and doesn't register as negative.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

The issue was indeed the free space and not the total space.

Simple command:


... Instantaneously creates a giant file that eats up disk space and makes the free space number drop into readable-by-an-old-program territory.

PHEW.

Noting this in my "Logic Audio work-arounds" notes. And creating a little batch file to toggle the file on and off for me.

Look at the Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT), specifically Using the EmulateGetDiskFreeSpace Fix, which bounds the amount of free disk returned to 2GB.

OOH NICE.

I've forgotten the command that does this but, What about defining some subdirectory of C as drive X and storing files there.

Googling... Nope SUBST won't work the new drive reports the same free space as the source drive

Maybe partitioning the drive would have also worked?

Yes, it would have worked, but didn't want to do it for more or less the same reasons I didn't want to resize the current partition to be smaller.