Fix “The file is too large for the destination file system” Error

3:32 PM Technology Enthusiast 0 Comments

                                                

Today, I decided to move off some of my Virtual Machine files to the My Book and clear up some of my hard disk. So I switched it on, plugged it in and tried to copy and paste it into the disk…

Windows tells me the file is too large for the destination file system. Bu-wha-? My virtual hard disks is over 4GB…but I checked! My Book had over 350GB free space! , I thought it was read-only thing (resetting it did nothing),

The darn thing was formatted in FAT32. Did you know FAT32 doesn’t accept files larger than 4GB? Now WHY a 500GB storage space is formatted in FAT32 is beyond me!

But now, I’ve got a dilemma.

1) if this was a new disk, I’d be able to reformat it (Right clicking the Drive in My Computer and Format)

2) but I got data, … luckily, on a Windows, you can convert your disk on the fly!

a) Run the command prompt as Administrator (Start->Command Prompt->Right-click->Run as Administrator)

b) At the command prompt, type

C:\Users\Nabeel>convert f: /fs:ntfs /nosecurity

where f: is the drive of your external hard disk.

fixed in 2 minutes.

UPDATE: When prompted to “Enter the current volume label for drive [Drive Letter Here]“, if your drive has a label, you need to enter it (e.g. “My Passport” without the quotations). If your drive doesn’t have a label, just press the enter key for blank.

To find the volume label (if there is one specified), go to ‘My Computer’, right-click the drive you’re trying to convert, select Properties. In the General tab, the volume label is the name in the first field.

C:\Users\Nabeel>convert f: /fs:ntfs /nosecurity
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Enter current volume label for drive H: My Book
The volume is in use by another process. Chkdsk
might report errors when no corruption is present.
Volume My Book created 1/31/2010 2:23 PM
Volume Serial Number is XXXX-XXXX
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
x44,136,352 KB total disk space.
x28 KB in 4 hidden files.
x44 KB in 17 folders.
x,063,072 KB in 63 files.
x41,072,576 KB are available.

x2,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
x,629,261 total allocation units on disk.
x,343,518 allocation units available on disk.

Determining disk space required for file system conversion...
Total disk space: x44196001 KB
Free space on volume: x41072576 KB
Space required for conversion: 369647 KB
Converting file system
Conversion complete