End of Media Error During Backup

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike Hogan
  • Start date Start date
M

Mike Hogan

I am trying to do a full backup of all files to another hard drive
but keep getting End of Media errors after about 4.2GB. I've tried
two different backup drives, a 40GB and a 80GB partition on a 160GB.
Both backup drives were empty to start with and formatted FAT32.
The source drive is 20GB with about 10GB used; OS is Win2k SP4.

My ultimate goal is to move the entire Win2k installation to a
larger drive without having to reinstall all the individual
drivers and applications.

Can anyone explain why I'm getting the errors, or suggest another
way to easily upgrade to a larger drive?

Thanks

Mike
 
Mike Hogan said:
I am trying to do a full backup of all files to another hard drive
but keep getting End of Media errors after about 4.2GB. I've tried
two different backup drives, a 40GB and a 80GB partition on a 160GB.
Both backup drives were empty to start with and formatted FAT32.
The source drive is 20GB with about 10GB used; OS is Win2k SP4.

My ultimate goal is to move the entire Win2k installation to a
larger drive without having to reinstall all the individual
drivers and applications.

Can anyone explain why I'm getting the errors, or suggest another
way to easily upgrade to a larger drive?

Thanks

Mike
Click to expand...

FAT32 volumes have a file size limit of 4 GBytes.
 
Pegasus said:
FAT32 volumes have a file size limit of 4 GBytes.
Click to expand...
Live and Learn. Thanks very much. I'll try reformatting the 40GB to
NTFS and see if I can do it then. Much obliged.
Happy New Year
Mike
 
And doing a backup will not enable you to move the installation to a new
drive, without some difficulty.
Many HD's are supplied with specific apps to move all to a new drive, or it
may be available on HD manu web site.
A third party tool, eg Acronis or Ghost will enable you to move a complete
installation to a new drive.
 
Most of my drives are Western Digital and I ran into the problem you
describe using their "Data Lifeguard" utility. I did a Make New
Boot Drive and the resulting drive had lots of problems. I finally found
a workaround method without having to use a "Ghost" type program.

I started with a 160G drive, partitioned into small and large
partitions then installed a minimal version of Win 2k on the samll one.
I connected the drive I wanted to backup and booted into the new Win2k
and used it's backup utility to save the entire target disk to the
large partition. Then I installed the new drive and used minimal Win2k
to format it and restore the original files. The result worked fine.

The advantage of using this method seems to be that all files on
the original are backed up; none are skipped because they are in use,
as happens when you do a backup from the active drive. Seems to work.
The whole process took less than 40 minutes vs. 3 hours doing a partion
to partition copy with the Western Digital that didn't work anyhow.
My drives are in removable carriers so it's easy to switch back and
forth.
 
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