USB hard drive - problem No 1

1

1eyedjack

New Member
Patience please - not a techie here.

I have two external USB drives by WD. One called a "MyBook", 250Gb, pre-formatted as FAT32. One an "Elements" terrabyte drive, also pre-formatted as FAT32. Both have loads of free space, as does my laptop (XP Pro, hard disk formatted as NTFS).

I try to copy a 12Gb file from my laptop to either USB drive and it fails on the grounds that there is not enough disk space (there is enough).

I have a sneaky suspicion that the root cause is the difference between NTFS and FAT32. Would I be right, or is there another reason?

What is the largest file size that I should be able to transfer?

Is it possible to re-format the external drives as NTFS, and if so, are there any advantages and disadvantages to doing this? And if no disadvantages, why would WD sell them formatted as FAT32 in the first place?

Thanks for any insight.
 
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I do believe its the way you formatted the drive. Its either because of fat32 or the cluster size. I heard something about 4gb or something was the biggest file size you could have? You might want to google "file size limitations on fat32" You will most likely need to back up your data to a different drive and then convert to ntfs.
 
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