A bit of a strange one, I'm trying to copy a 4GB video file to my portable HDD, which has 64GB of free space remaining, but when I try to copy and paste the file it tells me there isn't enough room on the device. I'm able to copy other small files such as photos, but this one video file comes up with this error. Anyone got any ideas?
Windows version number: 19045.3930
Reformat the HDD to either NTFS or exfat which accept files of 4gb or more.
If your external HDD is formatted FAT32, there is a file size limitation of 4GB.
as stated, you can convert the External to NTFS. Or move all the files off the external to another drive and Format it NTFS
C:\WINDOWS\system32>CONVERT K: /FS:NTFS
replace K: with the driveletter of the HDD
1) Can you take a screenshot of the properties of the external drive, like so? (You can omit private info from the picture). OR what does it say for File system? In my example, it says NTFS.
2) A bit of a strange.. step.. apparently. I didn't know this. I just saw this online.
How much space is on the drive that has that video file? Do you have less than 4 GB of free space on that drive that you are moving from?
According to this, you need at least 4 GB of free space on the drive with the video file.
[Not 100% sure if this info is accurate on this post though]:
Link
3) Can you please take a screenshot of that error message please?
I suspect the answer in the above comments are correct, in that there is a 4GB limitation on the size of a file I can transfer, which is something I didn't know about. And it is indeed a FAT32 file system.
Also on the HDD I am copying from there is '224GB free of 464GB'
The really bad thing about this of course is the failure of the message to be truly informative.
Explanation:
NTFS is a better choice (as above).Natively, you cannot store files larger than 4 GiB on a FAT file system. The 4 GiB barrier is a hard limit of FAT: the file system uses a 32-bit field to store the file size in bytes, and 2^32 bytes = 4 GiB (actually, the real limit is 4 GiB minus one byte, or 4 294 967 295 bytes, because you can have files of zero length).
So you cannot copy a file that is larger than 4 GiB to any plain FAT volume.
exFAT solves this by using a 64-bit field to store the file size but that doesn't really help you as it requires a reformat of the partition.
Yep. As stated above, the maximum size of a file that could exist on that drive would be as stated above:
fat32 filesize limit - Search
Your most likely option is to probably make a new folder on your main drive's Desktop, copy over everything from that FAT32 drive over to your main drive (since it has enough space [224 GB free space to store the external drive's 83.7 GB of files], convert that external drive to NTFS (which would erase everything on there), then you can move over the 83.7 GB files from your Desktop folder back to the external drive, which is now NTFS, and be able to move/copy that 4 GB file there too.
It would be very useful to use some 3rd party program which makes an exact duplicate of all that to your main drive, since there may be hidden files that may, or may not, make it with the copy over to your main drive.
Do you see what I mean. I don't want you to lose any data through this process, so you should take caution.
> One way is that once you make the copy from the external to your main drive, you can look at the properties of that folder on the main drive, and confirm the size is exactly:
Thanks all the advice, I appreciate your time as you've provided lots of information. I will indeed take caution when making the changes. Now that I've gone through it all I understand everything.
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