Error Copying File Or Folder - There Is Not Enough Free Disk Space

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Error Copying File Or Folder - There Is Not Enough Free Disk Space

Tech Tips (Search for Tech Tips) By Garnet (Search for Garnet)

Q. I have a new Seagate external hard drive with 400 gigabytes of storage, of which about 300 gigabytes is still free. I tried to copy some virtual hard drive files from Virtual PC to the drive, and almost immediate I got an error message "Error Copying File Or Folder", and the details was that "Cannot copy FILENAME: There is not enough free disk space. Delete one or more files to free
disk space, and then try again.". BTW, the file I was trying to copy was 7 gigabytes in size.

A. This drive comes from the manufacturer formatted with FAT32. If it is still formatted as FAT32, there is a 4GB file size limit.

To check if this is the case, open up My Computer. Right click on the disk drive letter for the external drive, and then select PROPERTIES from the popup context menu. You'll see next to "File system:" what kind of file system is used on the drive. If it says FAT32, you have a limit of 4GB on the size of files you can put on the drive.

Solutions:

• Use backup software that has spanning capabilities, such as NovaStor?Create|Search that can break the file into pieces smaller than 4GB. Note that you will always need to have the same backup software available to recover the file in the future.
• Reformat the drive as NTFS. Of course this is not easy if you've already filled the drive with files.
• It is possible to convert a FAT or FAT32 volume to an NTFS volume without formatting the volume, though it is still a good idea to back up your data before you convert.
  • A partition can be converted by using Convert.exe. For more information about Convert.exe, click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then press ENTER. In the command window, type help convert, and then press ENTER. For more information, see How To Convert A FAT32 Volume to NTFS

• Use a different kind of drive for your large files. You might consider an IOMEGA REV drive. Their cartridges have a capacity of 35GB.

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