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How to put large files onto a portable hard drive?

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horusofoz
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How to put large files onto a portable hard drive?

Hi guys

I have a 4.4 gb file I want to move onto my portable hard drive but it says there isn't enough room. There's a 100+ gb space free on the hard drive so I'm guessing it has something to do with the formatting or that. I don't really know anything about this sort of thing so was hoping one of the gurus here could help.

Thanks:-)

ottosykora
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what file system format?

4.4gb, well this is kind of too big for some of the usual once.
FAT32, respectively the extended version of it will handle files of maximum 4gb.
So you might have it to format in ntfs, which will be able then to accept it.

However care has to be taken, that the formating is done without 'rights' otherwise it will not be portable. So if you can format it while connected to host via usb and thus portable, it will be formated correctly.

Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland

Mir
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i faced a similar issue with

i faced a similar issue with a 8.7GB iso. it would not go from my NTFS internal drive to my 200GB external drive because the external drive was formatted as FAT.

I had a similar issue with the SUSE 10.3 DVD ISO which was 4.3GB. it would not transfer over to my 8GB thumb drive.

My solutions to these would be to reformat the 200GB drive to NTFS and lose all the data i have on it right now.

the thumb drive will remain FAT for compatibility reasons.

alpha1
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crop it it, then piece it

crop it it, then piece it back together later, tried and tested theory.

Lead, Follow, or get out of the way.

Mir
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the problem with that is

the problem with that is transfering or cropping a 8.7GB file with only 2GB or less free space on the original drive. IE it was impossible to crop. thats why i tossed the drive and got a larger one i the computer, installed linux on a EXT3 partition and never worried about it(XP) ever agian Biggrin

horusofoz
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Solved... mostly :-p

Ok I found out about the FAT32 (What my drive came as) one byte under 4gb size limit and how NFTS doesn't have this restriction, is less fragmented, faster, more reliable, etc. Rather than format my portable hard drive Ryan McCue told me about how you can convert to NFTS using XP's built in converter. However I have over 100gb worth of data of varying levels of importance so wont be chancing the loss of it. I understand one could back it up before trying out but with the size of the data in question its not really practical.

Anyway decided I'm upgrading to a bigger portable soon (WD 320 gb, currently WD 160 gb) so when I do I'll format it to NFTS before copying over all my files from my current portable. One issue with this I've found is where I have files with long names within long flder paths, eg

K:\Documents\Tafe Assignments\Certificate 3 in Business Administration & Certificate 2 in Government\Design And Develop Text Documents\Exercises\Little & Somers - W2000 Int Enquiry.doc

Windows often has trobule copying the files. Many of the files have long folder paths and/or file names so if anyone can suggest a way to fix this would be Hugely appreciated Smile

PortableApps.com Advocate

Mir
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i have the same problem. i

i have the same problem. i have a 200GB drive and it is out of the question to back it up.

My old disk drive was a 40GB NTFS but my back up was fat so i would run into a problem there with the 8-10GB files. yes i had/have some big stuff.

ggcs.tk
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just a side note i have a WD

just a side note i have a WD 250 however windows dislikes a ntfs removable drive and in my case under xp shows the had drive as being pretty much 10 gig bigger than the space in use no matter what i do i have found this on any NTFS external HDD over 120gig
just something u may end up running into with NTFS on the WD hdds

i know u all do your best and i thank you for your patience

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