Yesterday, when copying some large files to an external hard drive, Windows immediately gave me the following message:
Myfile is too large for the target file system.
So I wondered what could be causing this problem. I have a lot of free space on my external hard drive, so why don’t I copy this file?
Well, the reason for this problem is that my file was 4.3 GB in size and my external hard drive was formatted in FAT32 format. The maximum file size for FAT32 is 4 GB. The maximum file size for FAT16 is only 2GB!
So how do you fix this problem? Well, there are two ways to do this. You can either split the file into smaller parts and then copy it to an external hard drive, or convert the file system to NTFS where there is no limit on file size.
You can read my previous posts on using File Splitter or HJ-Split to split large files into smaller ones
– /
If you want to use the second method, read my post on how to convert hard drive from FAT to NTFS without data loss.
You should now be able to copy large files by either splitting them up or converting your hard drive to NTFS! If you have a USB drive, read my post on how to format a USB drive in NTFS format
If you cannot split the file for some reason and do not want to convert the file system on the disk to NTFS, the only possible solution is to try to compress the file. Windows 7 and Windows 10 have built-in compression tools, but you can also try third-party tools like 7-Zip, etc.
Check out my article comparing different compression programs to see if you can reduce the file size to a small enough size. Enjoy!
–