trouble backing up a 4GB file - strange disc behaviour

KiLLerCloWn · Post by **KiLLerCloWn** » Sat May 16, 2009 3:43 pm

Hi all,

long time no chat

I have a strange problem. I want to copy a 4.3GB .rar file to my USB backup disc. Iomega 500GB ac powered drive.

Now it tells me that there is not enough disc space. But there is! I have 100GB free.

I delete 9 GBs of files - still tells me there is not enough space when I try again.

However I can copy a 13GB directory with all its contents to the drive. So the space is obviously there!

Also I have no problem copying the 4.3GB .rar to any other drive, even to other PCs on my network - so the file seems to be OK, too!

And I can copy 2BG .rar files to the USB disc. So:

a) disc space is obviously available
b) file can be copied to other discs ( I also extracted it) so it's fine.
c) I can copy 2GB files fine, but 4GB files it tells me there's not enough space

Go figure!! Any ideas wth is going on there?

Cheers

KC

P.S.: I've now tried different files, .rars and ISOs with 4GB or more and I get that same error always

Badmojo · Post by **Badmojo** » Sat May 16, 2009 6:25 pm

is the drive formatted to ntfs, if not anything over 4gb it'll never copy to it

its why all dvd movies are always broken into 1gig chunks

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat May 16, 2009 6:31 pm

What Mojo said. I can almost guarantee that your external drive is formatted in FAT32.

You can use the Windows NTFS converter utility: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314097

Partition Magic will also convert a FAT32 partition to NTFS.

KiLLerCloWn · Post by **KiLLerCloWn** » Sat May 16, 2009 8:20 pm

Argh! Of course! Didn't see the woods for the trees!

Thanks for that!

KC

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Sun May 17, 2009 2:57 pm

Doh, this was an easy one & I didn't have a chance to get to it in time. I ran into this real quick back when I was running win98 & started into video editing.