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Nufy
02-04-2008, 04:12 PM
I have a USB 400G Western Digital external HD.

I am having trouble transferring large (> 1 Gig) files to it.

Everytime I try I get an error saying I don't have enough space available.

I have about 2 gig worth of stuff on there.

Any ideas ??
Bobblehead
02-04-2008, 04:23 PM
What OS do you have?
fredr123
02-04-2008, 04:27 PM
What OS do you have?

And do you know how the drive is formatted? Fat32? NTFS?
Nufy
02-04-2008, 04:35 PM
Win XP Home Edition.

The drive was plug & play out of the box. Not sure of formatting. Will check tonight.
photon
02-04-2008, 04:38 PM
File system shouldn't matter for a 1GB file, the FAT16 limit is still 2GB isn't it?

Is it something else like a timeout issue maybe?
Nufy
02-04-2008, 04:54 PM
Actually the files I want to transfer are about 7 gig each. Downloaded iso's of game DVD's.
fredr123
02-04-2008, 04:54 PM
File system shouldn't matter for a 1GB file, the FAT16 limit is still 2GB isn't it?

Is it something else like a timeout issue maybe?

Yup: http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm
photon
02-04-2008, 05:05 PM
Still weird though, if it was FAT16 or FAT32, wouldn't the volume size be limited then? You'd have to have multiple partitions rather than one 400GB partition.
Nufy
02-04-2008, 06:53 PM
Its FAT32

Can I re-format to NTFS ??
photon
02-04-2008, 07:12 PM
I can't think of any reason why not, you'll lose anything on it of course. I don't think that's the problem though, but might be worth a shot.
Nufy
02-04-2008, 09:51 PM
I can't think of any reason why not, you'll lose anything on it of course. I don't think that's the problem though, but might be worth a shot.


Do you lose any capacity ?
fredr123
02-04-2008, 10:12 PM
I formatted my first external hard drive with NTFS. Worked fine... until I tried to access the data with an Ubuntu machine. Linux and Mac don't play nice with NTFS out of the box (haven't tried Leopard). You can make it happen but it's more work than it should be.
photon
02-05-2008, 10:08 AM
Shouldn't lose any capacity with NTFS, and as fredr123 points out some extra work is required to access NTFS from linux or other OSes.
metal_geek
02-06-2008, 09:34 AM
You can convert Fat to NTFS without losing data easily enough...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307881

You'll run into issues moving from 1 computer to another redarding security with NTFS that you wouldn't with FAT.. but nothing you can't easily fix with a nice /takeownership command :)
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Hack&Lube
02-06-2008, 09:50 AM
You lose capacity depending on how you set the cluster sizes but that's all automatic unless you do it manually, it shouldn't be a big deal.

But still FAT32 -> NTFS should not do anything to improve the situation. It should honestly be fine under FAT32, it's wierd that it's erroring out like that. How old is the external, has it always been like this? If you are moving ISOs, are they rars and you are trying to extract to the external? In that case, the swap file for winrar is probably on your internal drive which is full.