I can’t copy files exceeding 4Gb to my external hard disk

Asked By thibaut 0 points N/A Posted on - 09/20/2011

Hi,

I have an external verbatim hard disk with 2Gb of capacity. In fact, when copying a large file (more than 4Gb of size), the copying procedure is always incomplete and stops at 4Gb of size of a corrupted file in my disk, but no error message is displayed.

Can anybody help me ?

Thanks

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Answered By Patrick b 0 points N/A #126057

I can’t copy files exceeding 4Gb to my external hard disk

Hi there Thibaut.

I'm willing to bet that your external hard drive is formatted as FAT32. FAT32 inherently has this 4 GB limit. To solve your problem, you will have to convert your external hard drive's file system into NTFS for you to be able to save files that are larger than 4 GB. Partition managers such as Partition Magic can convert from most file systems to another file system without having to reformat the hard drive. If you can't find a partition manager then the other option is to reformat the hard drive. This will erase all data on your hard drive.

• Take note that this 4-GB limit of FAT32 applies even to memory cards or USB flash disks. So if you intend to save files larger than 4 GB on any media, you should format it as NTFS.
• This article from Microsoft entitled "Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP" can probably explain why FAT32 has that limit better than I can.
• https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/314463/limitations-of-the-fat32-file-system-in-windows-xp

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Answered By kimanif 0 points N/A #126058

I can’t copy files exceeding 4Gb to my external hard disk

The problem is occurring because of the file system in your external is FAT32 volume which you need to convert to NTFS. This is because you can't increase the 4 GB limit in the Fat32 file system.

Note: Although the chance of corruption or data loss during the conversion is minimal, I recommend that you perform a backup of the data on the volume that you want to convert before you start the conversion.

To convert an existing FAT or FAT32 volume to NTFS, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt.
2. At the command prompt, type the following, where drive letter is the drive that you want to convert:
3. Convert drive letter: /f's:ntfs
4. For example, type the following command to convert drive E to NTFS:
5. Convert e: /f's:ntfs
6. When the conversion to NTFS is complete, you receive the following message at the command prompt:
7. Conversion complete
8. Quit the command prompt.

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• Posted on - 09/21/2011
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