Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Problem copying a large file to another Hard Drive?

My son wanted to copy a file that was very large ( over 4 GB ) from one of his internal hard drives to his external hard drive and keep getting an error message that wouldn't allow him to copy the file. After looking at his problem we determined that his external hard drive was formatted in Fat 32. The only way to copy files larger that 4 gigabytes is to have the external hard drive formatted to NTFS. So the lesson to the story is convert your external hard drives to NTFS and you won't have these problems.

To read more about Fat and NTFS go to "Comparing NTFS and FAT file systems"

To learn how to format your hard drive to NTFS or convert from fat to NTFS read this article from Microsoft.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yup, Fat32 has that pesky 4GB file size limit.

The good news is that WinXP has convert.exe - an utility that will convert a Fat32 volume into NTFS without loosing any data already on that partition.