File Splitting Problems At 4gb Help Please

happyhero

You have made me think and look further, could this be the problem, I said I had a C drive and a D drive but I also have a plug in drive on the top of my tower called I drive, which is where I am actually putting everything. I have checked all these drives and notice that whilst C drive is NTFS, both the D drive and I drive are fat32.

Why is this is this the problem, why are they not all NTFS and should I and can I change them without too much problem?

happyhero

That does seem to be the problem because I have moved the bits back to C drive and GSplit seems to be joining them without the error this time.

Does that mean I cannot have this file on my I drive, where I want to keep it?

I thought it would be the best place to keep my work, on a removable drive so I could access it on another PC if I wanted to in the future, acting a bit like a back up drive if my PC went wrong.

What should I do, ie should I and can I change my I drive to NTFS without problems to all the stuff I have on it?

And I thought the 4Gb bit only applied to how much Ram it would see, I am confused now, does it also apply to the maximum file size and if so how did it exist as a 10Gb file on my old PC or could that have been XP but NTFS?

abibee

I had this problem with my external drive, it came pre-formatted in FAT 32, I didn't notice any problem until I tried to move a file larger than 4 gigs onto it.

You'll have to format the drive to make it NTFS. If you want to keep what you already have on your I drive, I think you'll have to move it back onto your C: or drive, format I:, then move it back. A right pain I know.

One way to change I: to NTFS is to right-click on your 'My Computer' icon, and go to 'manage', from there you should see an option on the left called 'Disk Management'. There you will see all your drives, and you can select the option to format your external drive. It should prompt you if you want to format in FAT 32 or NTFS, choose NTFS.

I think I'm correct here, but you may wish to wait for a more expert reply, I'm not an expert.

I hope that helps.

happyhero

Really appreciate all this help but don't know much about fat32 and NTFS, I can do what you say. It seems that NTFS is the best, so why did it not come like that, there must be pro's and con's to the two formats? Is NTFS the best and is there a reason why I would not want NTFS?

Unstoppable_2

happyhero wrote: »

Really appreciate all this help but don't know much about fat32 and NTFS, I can do what you say. It seems that NTFS is the best, so why did it not come like that, there must be pro's and con's to the two formats? Is NTFS the best and is there a reason why I would not want NTFS?

External drives tend to come pre-formatted as FAT32 to give maximum compatibilty across operating systems. All operating systems from Windows to Mac OS, Linux, BeOS et al can read and write to FAT32 partitions whereas NTFS read/write is very new in Linux and breaks file permission settings.

Pros to NTFS
No 4GB filesize limit.
Better security options.

Cons
Limited support in other operating systems.

Pros to FAT32
Read by pretty much every operating system barring 16bit DOS.

Cons
4GB filesize limit
limited security options.

espresso

happyhero wrote: »

Really appreciate all this help but don't know much about fat32 and NTFS, I can do what you say. It seems that NTFS is the best, so why did it not come like that, there must be pro's and con's to the two formats? Is NTFS the best and is there a reason why I would not want NTFS?

You can learn about FAT here and NTFS here. If you want to store files larger than 4GB you need NTFS. If came pre-formatted FAT for backward compatibility with older systems and will work with newer systems with the 4GB limit, as you have indeed found.

happyhero

Just want to say thanks guys really appreciate all the help, learnt a lot and reading loads more now and learning loads more, was obviously an area I had stayed a little ignorant of, hence all my failed efforts at what I was doing.

Now formatting my I drive in NTFS (have temporary moved the stuff to C drive) (My I: drive is about 640GB and is an external drive but fits into top of tower case where it connects with sata2 connection.) Got involved in Allocation unit size as I saw that there were choices in the format although it was offering 4096 bytes. After some reading it seems this will probably be the best general size for me when you have a drive with all sorts on it (big and small files) so hope I have done that right.

Anyway thanks.