My PC thinks my Lacie USB HD is full and it isnt

[Jenny Taillier]

I appear to be having problem copying files from one drive to another and I wonder if anyone here knows where I am going wrong.

I have an internal 110 G HD which is pretty full so I have bought a Lacie 250 GB USB drive. I have copied a lot across to free space but I am struggling with a couple of larger files. They are approx 5 or 6 GB video captures and when I try to copy a dialogue box comes up advising me that there is not enough space to copy too. There is plenty as I have only used 50 gb so far and have around 200 free. It suggests disc cleanup or deleting files. Why does my PC think there isnt enough space to copy to? Is there a limit on file size that can copy across?

TIA

J


>> Edited by Jenny Taillier on Thursday 21st July 09:58

[speedychrissie]

i have a lacie 250G external, but i havnt had the same problem.

one thing that has happened tho is that it wont allow me to defrag it. i attempted to analyse it while my cpu was defrag-ing my internal hard drive and it now comes up with a statement saying that it cant do it. even when i take it to other cpus.

have you tried defrag-ing it?
are you sure you have been given a 250G version?

um.. thats all i can think of.
chris

[Jenny Taillier]

Thanks for the thoughts. Not tried defragmenting yet – haven’t had it long enough to make it untidy, but that shouldn’t take long.

It is definitely a 250 and the used space in properties is only about a fifth of the pie.

Copied across a couple of 3.2 GB files ok it just will not take the larger ones.

J

[ATG]

Very odd. We use them to backup individual files as large as 100GB without any problems.

Which operating system are you using?

Oh yes, and also what format did you use for the external discs (FAT, NTFS)?

>> Edited by ATG on Thursday 21st July 11:52

[__Lee__]

What I would do is copy files off the original to either the new disk or your HD and then delete the files off the original disk.

Sometimes you can have a problem where there is enough disk space to copy too but the source drive (original) hasn't enough spare space to complete the operation.

Damn computers!.

[Ian_H]

Just a thought but, the 5 or 6gb video captures you mention are these .avi files?, if so what format is the external drive, ntfs or fat32?, if it's fat32 there is a max avi file size of 4gb so you may have to convert the drive to ntfs format to allow it to store .avi files bigger than 4gb.



Cheers
Ian

[ATG]

Indeed, and XP's implementation of FAT32 can only use the first 32GB of a disc too.

[Jenny Taillier]

The PC is XP, the internal HD is NTFS and the Lacie is FAT32. I must confess I do not understand the differences between NTFS and FAT32 – the Lacie came formatted that way.

The offending file was indeed an .AVI video clip and was over 4GB so I think top banana award goes to Ian H. Thanks Ian, I had no idea that large AVIs and FAT32 didn’t mix!

ATG, I didn’t understand your note about the first 32 GB? Does this mean I should have reformatted the drive to NTFS before I started? That’s a bit of a pain as there is now too much to put back onto the internal to reformat the Lacie. If that’s the case I need to buy another to get these files out of the way before reformatting!

J

[aldi]

At a command prompt, you can type:

convert q: /fs:ntfs

Where q: is the drive letter of your external drive. This will convert the drive to NTFS. You'l loose a little bit of space (a few meg) and Windows 98 PC's wont be able to read it.

Might be worth running chkdsk q: beforehand also to make sure its in a good state before trying to convert it.

HTH

Neil

[ATG]

Jenny Taillier said:

ATG, I didn’t understand your note about the first 32 GB? Does this mean I should have reformatted the drive to NTFS before I started?

Ideally with a windows PC you would indeed have reformatted the disc to NTFS before using it, but as Aldi has posted, you can convert it after the event and all your files should survive.

re. the 32GB stuff .... According to the Microshoft webshite the Windows XP implementation of FAT32 has a maximum capacity of 32GB per drive regardless of how big the disc really is. (I wouldn't be surprised if the disc shows up as being much bigger than 32GB in Explorer, the pie chart window, etc ... nonetheless you can't write more than 32GB to the disc). This is rather silly as the FAT32 specification is supposed to be good for 2000GB ... but that's life.

[Jenny Taillier]

Many thanks. I will need to do something fairly sharpish as I have used 27.5 GB so far and I would have come up against that 32 limit shortly.

I will use the convert q: /fs:ntfs command.

Cheers all.

J

[scorp]

ATG said:

Jenny Taillier said: ATG, I didn’t understand your note about the first 32 GB? Does this mean I should have reformatted the drive to NTFS before I started? Ideally with a windows PC you would indeed have reformatted the disc to NTFS before using it, but as Aldi has posted, you can convert it after the event and all your files should survive. re. the 32GB stuff .... According to the Microshoft webshite the Windows XP implementation of FAT32 has a maximum capacity of 32GB per drive regardless of how big the disc really is. (I wouldn't be surprised if the disc shows up as being much bigger than 32GB in Explorer, the pie chart window, etc ... nonetheless you can't write more than 32GB to the disc). This is rather silly as the FAT32 specification is supposed to be good for 2000GB ... but that's life.

The limit microsoft add is to 'encourage' migration to NTFS. The FAT filesystem driver can access FAT volumes of any size (2tb max i beleive), it is the format function which is limited (it creates a small partition on purpose).