Can't Transfer Anything To External Hard Drive With Enough Space

[dazuk1972]

Hello.

I’m having a very odd problem with my external hard drive. At first today, the used disk space was about 70% and that would have left 30% of my hard drive unused. My external hard drive is 160GBs and the problem was, it never let me transfer anything in there that was the correct size to fit. It wouldn’t even let me transfer a DVD file at over 4GBs. I got a message telling me there wasn’t enough disk space. I had an idea and deleted a folder that contained over 7GBs to free enough disk space, it was too big for the Recycle Bin so it automatically deleted in full without me having to delete it from the Recycle Bin, too and when I tried to transfer the DVD file over 4GBs again, the same message came back. I have 62.5GBs unused. It’s not just DVD files that it won’t transfer, it won’t allow me to transfer other data neither. I can save small things like document, OK. By the way, Defragging never helped. Here is that message that I get. You’ll notice the icon called DiskCleanup. I tried that and there’s nothing to clean-up, it’s all at 0KBs.



I've done a virus scan and a Spyware scan and nothing was detected except for three bits of Spyware in my internal hard drive that succesfully deleted. Since then, no joy.

Many thanks.

Darren.

[volfann]

If it is formatted Fat 32 ,then you will need to format to NTFS to handle file sizes over 4 gig.

[Chewy]

iso's will get you every time

real pain

[dazuk1972]

If it is formatted Fat 32 ,then you will need to format to NTFS to handle file sizes over 4 gig.

Many thanks for the help. It is a FAT32 hard drive. I've had problems transfering any large folders now that don't involve DVD files.

I do want to ask something else that is most important to avoid corruption. Some files in my external hard drive is software that I installed. In the C-Drive we have Program Files. In my external hard drive that's my F-Drive, I created a folder called Program Files 2 and I installed software in there to save disk space in my C-Drive because my C-Drive has less than half the ammount. Anyway, my question is, if I tranfer everything to another external hard drive as my G-Drive (that I'm buying soon), when I transfer the folder Program Files 2 back to my F-Drive, would it corrupt the software when I either click on a Desktop shortcut or another shortcut under All Programs? I need to know this. I don't know if any software will load or perform properly. It's said if you modify some software in anyway it can either cause harm to the software or the PC. I need to know what's what. I don't what to create further problem.

Many thanks.

Darren.

[dazuk1972]

iso's will get you every time

real pain

Many thanks for your help.

I managed to transfer one ISO Image File into my external hard drive that's FAT32 and the task was OK. When I wanted to transfer a different big folder it failed with that image message that I posted. That was when I deleted over 7GBs of data and I still got the problem. Even if I never deleted the data over 7GBs I would have still had more than enough disk space. Now I've freed over 7GBs that leaves a lot more disk space, I have no idea what is blocking my data transfers. I've never come across anything as bizarre like this before.

Many thanks.

Darren.

[Chewy]

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=63

any drive over 32 gigs with fat32 is an accident waiting to happen

The partition size limit is approximately 128GB

now updates have changed some of this but not much

[dazuk1972]

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=63

any drive over 32 gigs with fat32 is an accident waiting to happen

The partition size limit is approximately 128GB

now updates have changed some of this but not much

Many thanks for the help and the link. I'm going to sort the data out in that hard drive soon, format it and change it to NTFS. I'll convert my next new hard drive to the same. I'm buying another because I need a lot of disk space. My Documents has over two DVD discs worth of files and I like to back them up in my external hard drive encase my internal hard drive goes belly-up and I can't back them up before formatting. I know I won't have everything as my back-up but I'll have at least 90% to 95% of my files backed-up. Some people don't back there's up and I wonder why. I do it once a week. I tried backing mine up yesterday and that was when I noticed the problem that I'm having.

Many thanks again.

Darren.

[Chewy]

even ntfs gets squirrley when you have too many files in a folder, best like for mp3's to keep down to a few thousand per folder

I was dividing up a 10,000 song karaoke database(20K files) and divided it into 9 folders
64 gigs worth

[dazuk1972]

even ntfs gets squirrley when you have too many files in a folder, best like for mp3's to keep down to a few thousand per folder

I was dividing up a 10,000 song karaoke database(20K files) and divided it into 9 folders
64 gigs worth

It's not a matter of how many I keep in a folder, some disallow a file now when either Moving or Copying. I found out I can still download something large as big as over 4GBs in my external hrd drive but not when I want to Move or Copy. The Move and Copy modes are disallowed. Downloading large stuff is allowed.

Many thanks.

Darren.