Does XP Have a File Size Copy Limit?

[Guest]

I am trying to back up some moviemaker files from my PC to an external USB
drive. Anything below 2gb seems fine but when I try to copy anything above I
get " Cannot copy, there is not enough free disk space. Delete one or more
files to free up disk space"

Tde disk being copied to has 100Gb free and the disk being copied from has
17Gb free and none of the files I have tried to copy have been bigger than
12GB.

Can anyone help?

 

[Tom]

I am trying to back up some moviemaker files from my PC to an external USB
drive. Anything below 2gb seems fine but when I try to copy anything above I
get " Cannot copy, there is not enough free disk space. Delete one or more
files to free up disk space"

Tde disk being copied to has 100Gb free and the disk being copied from has
17Gb free and none of the files I have tried to copy have been bigger than
12GB.

Can anyone help?

Your problem is more than likely that your filing system on the external drive is FAT32. FAT32 cannot handle any one single file size larger than 4GBs (minus a fews bytes of that anyway). Convert the drive to NTFS, and this limitation will disappear.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I am trying to back up some moviemaker files from my PC to an external USB
drive. Anything below 2gb seems fine but when I try to copy anything above I
get " Cannot copy, there is not enough free disk space. Delete one or more
files to free up disk space"

Tde disk being copied to has 100Gb free and the disk being copied from has
17Gb free and none of the files I have tried to copy have been bigger than
12GB.

Such a drive is likely to be in FAT 32 format (which has a 4GB limit on
file size). Or probably the copying software you use has a 2GB one;
that is the maximum that can be held in a signed 32 bit word, and
authors of such things often used such variables so they can work out
things like space calculations without bothering about results going
negative. Copying with Explorer ought to be OK up to 4GB on FAT 32, and
unrestricted on NTFS