Hey Russ,

Thanks so much for the advice. Yes, the drive is FAT32 and my laptop is 
NTFS.  I found a small and simple but effective file splitting program and 
have now moved the files to the external hard drive.  No need to combine 
them there, it's just for storage.

Thanks again.
Steve
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Russ Poffenberger" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 3:04 PM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Copy files


> Hi Steve,
>
> How is the external hard drive formatted? It is probably FAT32. FAT32 has 
> a
> limit of 2GB for a single file. Your internal disk is probably formatted
> with NTFS which does not have a practical limit to file size. Thus you
> cannot copy this file as-is. There may be some utilities to allow you to
> split up a file into smaller chunks, but you would not be able to combine
> them onto a FAT32 disk. This may be OK if you are just using the external
> disk to transfer to another computer (with disks formated with NTFS) where
> you can then re-combine the files.
>
> To see how the disk is formatted, open up Windows Explorer, and right 
> click
> on the drive letter and select "Properties". You could re-format the
> external disk to NTFS, but you would have to backup all the files on it
> first since formatting would erase all data on the drive (there may be 
> some
> utilities to non-destructively convert a FAT32 to NTFS format, but I would
> still backup the files first to be safe). Also be aware that an NTFS disk
> would NOT be recognized by most other operating systems like Win98, MAC,
> Linux, etc., so if you use it to transfer files to these OS's, you are
> generally out of luck for large files > 2GB.
>
> Russ Poffenberger
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Steve Howe
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 1:34 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: [PCBUILD] Copy files
>>
>> I'm trying to copy a 4.88 gigabyte file from my laptop to an
>> external hard drive with tons of space, over 100 gbytes.  I
>> get a message that says there's not enough room and I need to
>> delete files.
>> Steve
>>
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>>
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