File system FAT 32

[Jacko439]

I have an external drive on my computer which is supposed to have 500 Gigabytes storage space however I have just come to make a back up of my main computers programmes which require far less space than this but although it started OK I got the following message "lack of storage space or FILE SYSTEM FAT 32". AS anyone any ides how I can get round this problem so that I can utilize my external hard drive to its full potential.

[vehelpfulguy]

Did you format the external drive?

If you formatted it with FAT32 the maximum size is 32Gb so maybe you only formatted 32Gb and the rest is unformatted.

For a disk that size it is better to format it NTFS.

[vehelpfulguy]

Windows PX and Vista have a utiity called Disk Management which allows you to see how big your hard disk is and how much of it is formatted.

In XP you go into the Control Panel, then chose "Performance and Maintenance" then "Administrative Tools"

Within Administrative Tools open Computer Management and you wil see an option on the left called Data Management.

If you select that it shows you what disks you have, how big they are, and what partitions you have on each disk.

I assume it shows you extenral drives, must admit I have never used an external drive that plugs into the USB port.

[vehelpfulguy]

I said "Data Management" in my reply above, should have been "Disk Management"

Here is a picture of the Disk Management window so you know what you are looking for.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Bb4 57130.hb-02.1_big(en-us,TechNet.10).gif

[Jacko439]

have tried to do what was suggested by accessing the computer management screen as suggested but nothing came up remotely like the disc management screen. Where have I gone wrong?

[Jacko439]

Would also add that the external drive came already formatted and has quite a lot of other stuff on it, if I was to format this surely it would get rid of everything on there?

[vehelpfulguy]

DONT DO A FORMAT.

Sorry if I misled you, I was not suggesting you did a format.

I was just suggesting you look at the disk management screen to see if all your disk WAS formatted.

One important thing with FAT32 is that it has a single file size limit of 4Gb.

If your disk IS formatted as FAT32 and you are trying to copy a file larger than 4Gb on to it you may get that error above.

Have you perhaps got a large movie or video file (or other file) larger than 4Gb that you are trying to copy to the disk?

[vehelpfulguy]

Here is a picture of the "Computer management" screen I mentioned earlier

http://www.moonpoint.com/os/windows/xp/firewal l/computer-mgmt.jpg

You can see there is an option called Disk Management on the left.

Double click on that to get the "Disk Management" screen up I showed you earlier.

[fo3nix]

"If you formatted it with FAT32 the maximum size is 32Gb so maybe you only formatted 32Gb and the rest is unformatted. "

This is not true. FAT32 will go up to around 2TB.

But vehelpfulguy is correct in that it only supports individual files up to 4GB in size.

If you want more than this and use Windows, format it as NTFS.