Fun fun.\u00a0 I was trying to copy 6gb iso file to my 8gb flash drive (where 7gb was free) and I kept getting an error message that the file ‘is too large for the destination file system’.\u00a0 I didn’t have time to fiddle with it – so I left it.\u00a0 Yesterday during a backup, I got the same message again trying to back up my Windows Media Center recorded tv shows.\u00a0 The 1tb drive was empty, yet I kept getting errors about not having enough disk space.\u00a0 Ok, what’s going on?<\/p>\n
USB drives and external HD’s are often formatted with FAT32.\u00a0 You cannot copy a file larger than 4gb to a FAT32 system.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Vista gives you the cryptic file is too large for the destination file system error instead of telling you the real reason is that FAT32 cannot handle files that big and what to do to fix it.<\/p>\n
So, how to get around it?\u00a0 You need to convert the file system to NTFS (or other file system that can handle files that big).\u00a0 You can obviously reformat the drive,\u00a0 but that’s a pain if you have data on the drive already.\u00a0 You can, however, do a one-way convert to NTFS without data loss on the drive by using the command:<\/p>\n
convert X<\/em>: \/fs:ntfs \/nosecurity<\/p>\n Where X<\/em>: is the drive letter you want to convert.\u00a0 As long as you have about 10-15% of the volume empty, and you don’t have any files on that drive open, the file system conversion will happen and all your files will be there as before.\u00a0 It’s a fairly quick process – about a minute or two on my external 1tb drive (drive was almost empty).\u00a0 So, a very poor Vista error that doesn’t tell you how to fix it, but a very smart tool that does what you need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fun fun.\u00a0 I was trying to copy 6gb iso file to my 8gb flash drive (where 7gb was free) and I kept getting an error message that the file ‘is too large for the destination file system’.\u00a0 I didn’t have time to fiddle with it – so I left it.\u00a0 Yesterday during a backup, I got the same message again trying to back up my Windows Media Center recorded tv shows.\u00a0 The 1tb drive was empty, yet I kept getting…<\/p>\n