# Large file to pen drive transfer issue.



## bobble14988

I'm at work and I've just been visited by a customer with a 16GB pen drive and a year old laptop running Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit.

The customer said that he could not transfer files larger than 4 or 5 gigs to his pen drive. He had tried it not only on his laptop but on a desktop computer too with the same results. "There is an error message before the transfer even begins saying there is not enough space on the device" he told me. I had a look at the pen drive and it looked fairly new and shiny but i forget the name of the manufacturer, doh!

I'm only a lowly Dixons employee so its not like I _should_ know the reason for this problem but I'm quite interested in things like this so I was wondering if anybody is able to give me an insight into the problem. If they've experienced the same thing with other devices or if its an issue limited to a range of cheaper pen drives?

If you want to respond to this, feel free to even go into the knitty gritty detail about it. 

Thanks.


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## chibicitiberiu

Theoretically and practically you can't transfer files bigger than 4 GB on your pen drive if the file system used is FAT32.

What's a pen drive by the way?

You could go around this limitation using WinRAR or other archive manager. What you have to do is archive the file you want to transfer on the drive on volumes (around 3-4 GB each). 

For more details about the FAT32 file system check this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat32 

You could try formatting the drive using the FAT extended format which is only compatible with *Vista SP1*. It won't work on xp, or on Vista, the original release without SP1. The file size limit for this file system is 2 at the 64th power bytes (16 Exabytes)


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## fade2green514

does that have something to do with 32-bit versus 64-bit applications? weird ive never heard of that.


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## chibicitiberiu

No.


FAT32, NTFS (hard drives only), FAT are file systems. What they do is manage the hard drive or flash memory (only FAT/FAT32) or whatever memory you have.
FAT32 is just a name, like NTFS, ext3 (linux), FAT (floppies/very old hdds from win95 and older)
FAT for example is still used on floppy disks. FAT32 is the best one which is compatible with the Windows 98/95 OSR2/Me operating systems. It is rarely used now on modern 2000/xp/vista hard drives, only upgrades from 98/95/Me still use FAT32.
But it is still the best one available for other memory drives (flash memories, memory cards etc) compatible with all the operating systems newer than 95 OSR2.
It has this annoying limit file size of 4 GB, so you can't go around this problem.

There is a new version of FAT, FAT Extended which is *only available for vista sp1* with few million GB as limit, so if you want to transfer some files using FAT Extended from Vista SP1 to Vista original release or xp, it won't work.


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## bobble14988

Thanks chibicitiberiu! Very comprehensive.


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## Adam135

chibicitiberiu, why do you say there is no way round this? There is. 

Simply - 

Format it to NTFS instead of FAT32,

FAT32 has a combined storage limit of 32GB and a maximum file size of 4GB as said above.

NOTE: The one I have got Clicky.


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## chibicitiberiu

I have just found out that it is possible to convert flash drives to NTFS like this:
On xp:
1. Open cmd (start - run - 'cmd' - ok)
2. Type in the console: "convert [drive letter] /FS:NTFS" and press Enter.
or
(if you want to format the drive, not just convert)
2. Type in the console: "format [drive letter] /FS:NTFS 
That's all, folks.

I have just tried it with my 256 MB flash drive and it worked. I didn't knew that it was possible because it didn't appear in the format window.


hmm.....this makes me think about changing the signature....


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## Adam135

This program works v.well when formating pen drives -

HP USB Disk formating tool


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