Hard Drive Capacity - why does it say it's full, when it really isn't?

Factual Questions
1

Sorry…. Techie computer question coming…

My external hard drive acts like it is almost full, yet the Properties of the drive still shows plenty of space.

Gory details: My external drive is a 200GB Maxtor One Touch II.
When I look at the Properties of that drive, it indicates:

Type: Local Disk
File System: FAT32
Used Space: 88.3 GB
Free Space: 101 GB
Capacity: 189 GB

Problem: When I now try to copy a file of 7 GB onto that drive, I get an error message saying that there is not enough free space. :confused:

How should I tackle this problem? I would expect I could use another 101 GB on that drive.
My computer is a Dell purchased in 2006, running XP.

2

Why did you format it as fat32?

Fat32 has a file size limit. You’ve got space … the file is too big.

3

Fat32 has a maximum file size of 2^32 - 1 bytes, or just under 4 GiB. You will have to convert the file system to NTFS - Here is an article from Microsoft on how to do that.

4

This place is great!
Thanks. :slight_smile:

5

The problem is not free space, but that FAT32 has a file size limit of 4 GB. Either split your file or convert the drive to NTFS or ExFAT (Wikipedia is better). I’ve not used ExFAT, so cannot vouch for it.

6

See here for adding ExFAT support to Windows XP.

7

OK, one more question…

When I attempt to convert my k: drive, using this command:
convert k: /fs:ntfs
it returns this message:
CONVERT is not available for RAW drives.

What’s going on here? The properties of my external k: drive say it’s a FAT32. So why am I getting that message, and what should I do?

8

Is part of your external drive unformatted?