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Weird External Hard Drive Problem

post #1 of 11
5/12/05 at 12:01pm
Thread Starter 
I hope one of you guyz can help me with this thing. I got this new external hard drive. It has 250gb. Every time I try to copy a file larger than 4 gb on it it says that there is no free space to copy it, although there are like 200gb left. Any ideas how to fix this?
By the way, I have just noticed that it is formated as FAT32. Maybe this has to do with this? All other drives are NTFS.
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post #2 of 11
5/12/05 at 12:16pm
I would say NTFS is the way to go, but this is not the reason you are having problems with your external drive. Are you positive that Windows is recognizing it as a 250GB drive? Maybe you need to reinstall drivers? Call the manufacturer of the enclosure.
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post #3 of 11
5/12/05 at 12:24pm
Thread Starter 
After I got the message there is not enough space I have copied about 50 gb of files smaller than 4 gb each. But I have two files that are longer than 4 gb and they both have this problem. And windows recognises it as 250 gb as well. And it says it has 170 gb left.
I have heared that fat32 does not support large hard drives. And what I am afraid it does is format it as approximately 60x4gb parts.
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post #4 of 11
5/12/05 at 12:35pm
I remember we used to use FAT32 with large files all the time. You could try formating with NTFS. But I just am suprised that it wont let you! Back it up and reformat!
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post #5 of 11
5/12/05 at 12:53pm
Maximum file size on a FAT32 partition is 4GB. Here is a link if you want to read more:

File Systems
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post #6 of 11
5/12/05 at 12:56pm
Thread Starter 
Stupid people! I have spent two hours backing up everything! Thanks guyz.
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post #7 of 11
5/13/05 at 12:53pm
Quote:
Stupid people!
Sorry, I guess I am not as familiar with FAT32 as I thought. So is it possible to convert a drive from FAT32 to NTFS?
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post #8 of 11
5/13/05 at 12:58pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by KAROLOYDI
Stupid people!.
I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about the people who formated the hard drive. It is very easy to make it ntfs. All you have to do is waste 3 hours of your time backing everything up, deleting the partition and formating it. And then puting everything back again.
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post #9 of 11
5/13/05 at 1:01pm
I just remember Windows having some converter that changed a drive from FAT32 to NTFS without file loss.
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post #10 of 11
5/13/05 at 1:05pm
Thread Starter 
Now you tell me
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post #11 of 11
5/14/05 at 9:11pm
I just copied a 50GB chunk of my neighbors Sonar audio files to my external 60GB with no problems at all. I am formatted NTFS tho'. No problems here!
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