Baffled by disc full message from external hard drive

thor

I have come across an odd problem with a verbatim external hard drive connected to my WinXP PC via usb.
I am moving some files over to the drive from my computer and have unexpectadly got a 'disc full' error message. The reason it is unexpected is that when I check the drive by right clicking on it it, it lists the capacity as 465GB which is fine as the drive is a 500GB model but it also says that 300GB has been used leaving 165GB free. Now I am just trying to add a 13GB home video avi file so how can it report there is not enough space? By my reckoning there should be at least 150GB+ left. I could format the whole drive an try again but then I would lose the 300GB I already have on there with nowhere to park all of it. Can anyone shed some light on this?

GunJack

is the external drive partitioned ?? If so, you may have to use the other partition

-TangleFoot-

What filesystem has it been formatted with? FAT32 doesn't allow for files greater than 4,294,967,295 bytes in size.

debitcardmayhem

Or perhaps you have used it on another PC , are you trying to copy the files to the root (ie Z:\ or some such) or into another folder that may have been created on another pc.

thor

Tanglefoot got it right. As soon as I had typed in my plea for help I had another go with a 5GB file which then proceeded to also fail. Looking at what bits managed to get over for these files I noticed that both were exactly the same size at just over 4GB and then it struck me that the drive had come pre-formatted and that I had just left it at that. I did not even bother finding out what the file format was. I reasoned that it had to be FAT32 so I googled to find out how/if a FAT32 drive could be converted to NTFS without loss of data. Well lo and behold it turns out that XP has it's own little utility CONVERT which does the job so I went ahead and used it with the end result that I now have an NTFS external hard drive containing files upto 13 GB in size. Job Done!
Thanks for taking an interest guys.

John_Gray

Well done! Remember that there are disk space utilisation reporting programs like TreeSize Free which will, err, report on the utilisation of disk space!