I have a 25 GB .mov file I’d like to move from my laptop hard drive to my WD 1 TB portable drive. There is 450 GB of free space on the portable drive but the error message says, “Not enough space, clear up some free space, blah blah blah…”
What’s going on?
Thanks
Maybe you need to defrag it first.
Large files (larger than about 4 or 5 gig) cannot be coppied to Fat32 or Fat16 drives. It needs to be formatted as NTFS.
Unfortunatelly most **portable **drives come formatted as Fat32 (for compatibility) so you’ll need to reformat it.
I suggest copy the already on it off, reformat, copy the data back on, plus your 25 gig file.
I’d agree this is probably the reason. FAT32 limit is 2 gb per file.
Yep, convert to NTFS and be very careful unplugging it (always do a safe removal).
Heed the warnings in that article, just shutting off write-caching will help a lot.
That said, you can cut the file into 2gig chunks using 7zip but it will be unplayable as it will be 50 zip files and not one big mov file. You can, of course, uncompress it into the original 25gig file to your laptops drive when you want.
#&$%#@# Fat32.
Alright, thanks a lot for the info. I’ve got a lot of file transfers and formatting to do.
Cheers
Nitpick, 13 or so zip files, not 50. 
Use TeraCopy to copy your files. It’s much faster than Windows’ native copying.
There’s a command-line utility called CONVERT in Windows XP (and presumably Vista) that will allow you to convert the FAT32 drive into NTFS.
Hmmmm… Will I lose any data?
Not in my experience – I had the same problem as you (an application told me I was out of space when its data file grew larger than 4GB, despite the fact that my external drive had many hundreds of gigabytes free), and I realized all my external drives (one 300GB, two 500GB, one 750GB, and two 1TB drives) were FAT32. They were all full of data, and I wasn’t looking forward to moving everything off each drive one by one, reformatting as NTFS, and re-copying everything. I was going to use PartitionMagic, but then I discovered the CONVERT command on Google, and it worked great – all of my drives were converted cleanly without losing any data. Of course, you want to make sure the drive doesn’t have any existing errors by running CHKDSK beforehand.
BTW, chrisk said FAT32’s file size limit is 2GB, but it’s 4GB in my experience.
Thanks for that. I’ll give it a try if I develop the courage.
CONVERT is very reliable. You can even use it to convert the boot drive of a Windows computer (although it will report that it has to do it at boot time, and ask if you want to schedule it for your next reboot). I’ve used it hundreds of times without losing a single byte of data.
The command line to use is:
convert e: /fs:ntfs
Substitute the appropriate drive letter* for e: if your external drive is different.
NTFS is a proprietary file system and should probably be avoided if possible; it tends not to be fully compatible with non-Microsoft software. There are many other file systems out there which are unencumbered by secrecy, patents, etc., and which support files larger than 4 GB. (Unfortunately, if you’re using Microsoft Windows, you’re probably locked into using either FAT* or NTFS.)
It’s popular enough and supported well enough that I use it for my external drives, and I’m a Mac user.
For me, alternatives such as HFS+ or ext3 just aren’t that convenient.
I may have misremembered that point.
Actually I was thinking it was 2GB as well, until I remembered how I was almost, but not quite, able to copy a huge file off a DVD.
I think FAT16 has a 2GB limit on the size of individual partitions, which is probably where our “2GB limit” memory came from.
What do you use to be able to use your external drives on the mac? I also hit problems with my drives being formatted FAT32, and the only reason they’re not NTFS is because I want to be able to see and write to them from my mac.
There are two major players in this area: NTFS-3g (open source) and NTFS for Mac from Paragon Software.
The open source product is very popular and, presumably, quite reliable. I chose to use the commercial product because I use NTFS for all of my backups and I wanted a commercial vendor providing support. They are selling v7.0 now, but the version I use, v6.5, is still available at Amazon for ten bucks.
In the past, NTFS for Mac was much faster than NTFS-3g, though I don’t know if this gap has closed any.
This is most likely because Apple has licensed the technology from Microsoft. Microsoft has never published the full specifications for NTFS, so it’s difficult for any third party to provide support unless they’re willing to pay dearly for it.