Error Copying File Or Folder - There Is Not Enough Free Disk Space

Featured: Featured Stories | Picture Gallery

NeedsCleanup | Book All You Need To Know About The Music Business

Chat11.com Web Bible11.com MyBibleCenter.com

Error Copying File Or Folder - There Is Not Enough Free Disk Space

Tech Tips By Garnet

Q. I have a new Seagate external hard drive with 400 gigabytes of storage, of which about 300 gigabytes is still free. I tried to copy some virtual hard drive files from Virtual PC to the drive, and almost immediate I got an error message "Error Copying File Or Folder", and the details was that "Cannot copy FILENAME: There is not enough free disk space. Delete one or more files to free
disk space, and then try again.". BTW, the file I was trying to copy was 7 gigabytes in size.

A. This drive comes from the manufacturer formatted with FAT32. If it is still formatted as FAT32, there is a 4GB file size limit.

To check if this is the case, open up My Computer. Right click on the disk drive letter for the external drive, and then select PROPERTIES from the popup context menu. You'll see next to "File system:" what kind of file system is used on the drive. If it says FAT32, you have a limit of 4GB on the size of files you can put on the drive.

Solutions:

• Use backup software that has spanning capabilities, such as NovaStor?Create that can break the file into pieces smaller than 4GB. Note that you will always need to have the same backup software available to recover the file in the future.
• Reformat the drive as NTFS. Of course this is not easy if you've already filled the drive with files.
• It is possible to convert a FAT or FAT32 volume to an NTFS volume without formatting the volume, though it is still a good idea to back up your data before you convert.
  • A partition can be converted by using Convert.exe. For more information about Convert.exe, click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then press ENTER. In the command window, type help convert, and then press ENTER. For more information, see How To Convert A FAT32 Volume to NTFS

• Use a different kind of drive for your large files. You might consider an IOMEGA REV drive. Their cartridges have a capacity of 35GB.

Did This Solve Your Problem?

Tech Tips By Garnet ...

If this page helped you, please contact me and let me know.

I spend a lot of time tracking down solutions to many problems and questions, and it takes a lot of time to write about the answers so you can benefit from them. But I hope this page helped you solve your problem, or answered your question, clearly and quickly. If you'd like to support my making more tech tips, please donate a couple of bucks via paypal! For any size donation, I'll send you an Internet Guide on the topic of your choice to include on your website. See [Guides To The Internet] for some examples.

Please also consider making a link to this page from your website.

You can also reach me privately with your questions at [my contact page]!

- Garnet

Bobsgear - Get A Free Enterrpise Wiki Space!
Review: The Bobsgear Project was started to develop a variety of Confluence plugins. This installation of the Confluence Enterprise wiki includes flexible attachments, many Confluence plugins, personal blogs, interesting articles, and more. Bobsgear already has spaces related to politics, art and photography wiki, technical issues wiki, ediscovery wiki, health, Christian theology and Sabbath School wiki, the bible, book reviews, and quotations. Bobsgear allows free signup, and invites anyone to create a free hosted Confluence wiki space.

NEW USERS CLICK HERE! for a quick introduction to Wiki.

Elapsed:1