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
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> -----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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