How do I resolve errors (in reference to Mathematica) when using DriveSpace?

These comments are relevant only to Windows 95.

Attempting to run DriveSpace to compress a hard disk containing Mathematica 3.0 or 4.0 will fail because of the deeply nested subdirectories that Mathematica uses. This failure occurs because when DriveSpace is compressing the drive, it is actually running on real mode DOS. Real mode DOS cannot interpret the long path names on which Mathematica is dependent.

To protect itself, DriveSpace first checks the disk for possible problems before switching into DOS mode. One of the problems it flags is the presence of deeply nested directories that cannot be represented in the 66-character DOS limit. When DriveSpace hits this error, it will stop checking the disk, report the disk as having "errors", and suggest you run ScanDisk. See the following page for more details.

http://support.wolfram.com/mathematica/systems/windows/general/scandisk.html

It should be understood that this is not a problem with Mathematica, but is instead a limitation of the DriveSpace program included with Windows 95. Any application installed that creates a large of number of subdirectories (that exceed DOS's old 66 character limit) will also have this problem. One possible workaround is to use shorter pathnames than Mathematica's defaults.

• When you installed Mathematica, you were prompted with a default installation directory. You can specify a different, shorter directory. See the following page for more information.

  http://support.wolfram.com/mathematica/systems/windows/general/installdir.html

• You can specify a different, shorter directory for the preferences as well. See the following page for more information.

  http://support.wolfram.com/mathematica/systems/windows/general/prefsdir.html

Questions or comments? Send email to support@wolfram.com.