Problems transferring to External HD

[John1012]

I copied a Hi-8 video (2 hours long) to my HD into a .mpg file. The file is about 7.5 GB. For some reason I can't transfer the the file to my external HD. I get the message that "there is not enough space on hard drive" even though there is plenty of space. I tried a flash drive and a Western Digital external drive on a USB 2.0 port and got the same error message.

 

Interestingly, smaller files (3.5 GB) transfer without a hitch.

 

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

[Larry]

My guess is that the 2 external hard drives you've tried to copy to are formatted with the FAT32 file system, which has a 4gb file size limit per file. The flash drive would be FAT32 also and is typical of those. So any one file larger than 4gb can't be copied to those drives.

 

You need to convert the hard drive(s) to the NTFS file system in order to be able to copy files larger than 4gb.

[John1012]

Formatted the drives to NTFS and the files transferred perfectly.

Thanks Larry.