Any ideas how I can "cure" this problem?

Heres the deal, I have an external USB2 250GB backup HDD, It has 163GB free on it and I am trying to backup a 5GB file to it.

However, windows keeps telling me the drive doesnt have enough space on it, even though there is 163GB free, very odd........

Is the HDD maybe formated in FAT32?
If that's the case, FAT32 has some limit in size of file you can copy at one go. So either format it again to NTFS or chop up the file in smaller pieces.

You can also convert it to NTFS.

convert X: /fs:ntfs

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb456984.aspx

Is the right answer, thanks people

It was FAT32, will convert it to NTFS now

Quote from BlackEye :

FAT32 has some limit in size of file you can copy at one go.

4 GB to be exact.

Make sure you take everything you want off of it first, formating a drive to NTFS will erase everything on it!

EDIT: Wikipedia:

Quote :

The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 Byte (232−1 bytes).

Quote from Dennisjr13 :

Make sure you take everything you want off of it first, formating a drive to NTFS will erase everything on it!

EDIT: Wikipedia:

Actually, it doesn't, the convert command from the CMD box leaves the data intact.

It worked well for me, after using chkdsk because windows was moaning the USB drive was "dirty", hmmm.....must have noticed all the "specialist" movies on there...........

Quote from danowat :

Actually, it doesn't, the convert command from the CMD box leaves the data intact.

It worked well for me, after using chkdsk because windows was moaning the USB drive was "dirty", hmmm.....must have noticed all the "specialist" movies on there...........

Not more of your beastiality fetish?

Quote from [RCG]Boosted :

4 GB to be exact.

Well, no... 4,294,967,296 GiB to be exact

Quote from JamesF1 :

Well, no... 4,294,967,296 GiB to be exact

Actually, it would be 4,294,967,296 Bytes

Actually, James wins :P Wikipedia it :P

Gibibyte? Wtf, thats a new un

I'm just confused why you can write so many billion GiB and it still equates to 4GB?
Would not the correct answer have simply been 4GiB instead of 4GB? Wiki is basically telling me 4,000,000,000 = 4GB, or 4,294,967,296 = 4GiB.

Please explain.

GB = the stupid HD manufacturers, which is an even number literally a billion bytes
GiB = the proper calculation. which is the amount of bytes it is (Go wiki Binary Prefix)

its just a stupid new unit aimed to clear some confusion for pc illierates but all it achieves is to add more confusion

The normal multipliers M, G, k, etc are for powers of ten. These are used e.g in normal physical measurements. The Mi, Gi, ki etc are powers of 2. Those are used for some computer related measurements where things are multiples of 2 rather than 10. For example M=10^6, while Mi=2^20=1,048,576.

Thank you. I think I see where I went wrong. I forgot what the original argument was LOL. I got information overload with all the numbers.

Still, wouldn't the answer have simply been 4GiB instead of 4GB? I'm still confused as to why you can express it as 4,294,967,296 GiB.

Thanks for the reading suggestions though. I now understand why I get ripped off with HDD's
I'll keep racking my brain over it though. Good stuff. I gave up with computers years ago. I couldn't keep up, both financially and mentally.

Quote from PaulH :

...
Still, wouldn't the answer have simply been 4GiB instead of 4GB? I'm still confused as to why you can express it as 4,294,967,296 GiB.
....

4,294,967,296 GiB is wrong. It should be 4,294,967,296 B or 4GiB

4,294,967,296 GiB would be 4*2^30*2^30B=4*2^60B=4 'eksa bit' bytes=4EiB (c 1.15e18, which is something quite huge).

Quote from Blaeza :

Not more of your beastiality fetish?

That was Niko, remember?

Quote from Aquilifer :

4,294,967,296 GiB is wrong. It should be 4,294,967,296 B or 4GiB

4,294,967,296 GiB would be 4*2^30*2^30B=4*2^60B=4 'eksa bit' bytes=4EiB (c 1.15e18, which is something quite huge).

Hurrah for my typos

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

GB = the stupid HD manufacturers, which is an even number literally a billion bytes
GiB = the proper calculation. which is the amount of bytes it is (Go wiki Binary Prefix)

GB: a unit shortsighted computer scientists came up with when they realized that 2^10=1024 bytes were almost the same as 1000 bytes. Problem is that the larger the amount of data is, the higher the error. Saying that 1024 bytes is about the same as 1000 bytes is an error of 2.4%. But saying that 1 GB is about the same as 1 000 000 000 Bytes is an error of 7.4 %.

Gigas and megas have been around for ages, computer geeks were silly to think they could create new definitions without even allowing for distinction between their new definitions and the SI conventions. And it's not very useful. If I have two 700 MB files, how much is that together? According to computer guys it's 1.36718 GB instead of 1.4 GB. So who's silly?