Solved back up recovery d question

[Larry D]

Hello all, I want to back up my recovery d. I have a old hard drive i am using for backing up. It is connected with a usb to ide wire and is being used as a external drive. It has 13.9 gb free space. The d recovery is 9.89 gb. When i try to copy it to the (external) hard drive i get a message that the factory.win is too large for the destination file system. Not sure what this means or how to fix it. Thanks for any comments. Ps I know this is a hokey set up but what the heck it's free space! LOL

View attachment 9089

 

[coolnewyorker]

All it means is you need to get a bigger external HDD. Maybe it needs more free space.

Or you can delete(or transfer to DVD) whatever is in it to make more room.

 

[Larry D]

Coolnewyorker, 13.9 is free and the recovery is 9.25. Why would this not be enough? Thanks for the reply.

 

[Dzomlija]

Hello all, I want to back up my recovery d. I have a old hard drive i am using for backing up. It is connected with a usb to ide wire and is being used as a external drive. It has 13.9 gb free space. The d recovery is 9.89 gb. When i try to copy it to the (external) hard drive i get a message that the factory.win is too large for the destination file system. Not sure what this means or how to fix it. Thanks for any comments. Ps I know this is a hokey set up but what the heck it's free space! LOL

View attachment 9089

Chances are high that the external drive to which you want to copy the filr is formatted with FAT32, for which the maximum filesize is 4GB. You will need to first format the external drive as NTFS, which isn't always supported by some external flash drives.

 

[Larry D]

Dzomlija, I think you are right it is fat32. Thanks much! (edit) It is a actual internal hd being used as a external. Can you give me a how to ntfs?

 

[Dzomlija]

Dzomlija, I think you are right it is fat32. Thanks much!

What you need to do then is copy all the contents of the external drive to a temp location on another drive, then format it as NTFS. If you can't empty the drive first, then try using CONVERT from an Administrative Command Prompt to convert it to NTFS.

Although backing up the contents first then formatting directly to NTFS is the safer option...

 

[Larry D]

your reply was way fast before my edit. LOL! Thanks i will give it a try.

 

[coolnewyorker]

@Dzom...what if he just gets a much bigger ext. HDD, does he still need to re-format? Or reformatting automatically makes it bigger already for successful backup.

Which is effectively easier to do?

 

[Dzomlija]

@Dzom...what if he just gets a much bigger ext. HDD, does he still need to re-format? Or reformatting automatically makes it bigger already for successful backup.

Which is effectively easier to do?

You're not reading all the posts, are you, neither do you much understand the basics of HDDs:

1. A new hard hard disk must always be formatted, regardless.
2. Formatting does not automatically make it bigger. The only thing that can do that is compression or partitioning, and then you're also limited only to the maximum physical capacity of the drive.
3. Regardless of the capacity or amount of freespace of the drive, if it is formatted as FAT32, Larry would still not be able copy a file larger than 4GB - that is the maximum filesize limit imposed on the FAT32 structures.

 

[Larry D]

Ok, I am in the process of formatting to ntfs. I think i should have changed the allocation size as it is set at 4096 ? Just a rookie here so please hang with me.

 

[Dzomlija]

Ok, I am in the process of formatting to ntfs. I think i should have changed the allocation size as it is set at 4096 ? Just a rookie here so please hang with me.

Not a problem, Larry.

4096 Bytes (4K) is the default allocation size for NTFS volumes, so you can rest easy.

And there is no need to apologize for being a rookie - we all started somewhere, even guys like brink or z3r010 who leave me standing in their dust!

 

[coolnewyorker]

Me, too...a rookie. But this is interesting learning. Let me know how it goes, Larry.

 

[Dwarf]

Hi Larry,

In addition to what Peter has said about cluster sizes for NTFS volumes, these are 4K in size by default and in fact remain at that size even for very high capacity disks/arrays. This is because of the differences between the FAT(32) and NTFS file system, which make the latter far more economic with disk space useage. In addition, the maximum single file size, which stood at 4GB for FAT32 formatted disks/partitions, is now limited only by the actual size of the disk/array when formatted as NTFS.

 

[coolnewyorker]

I got a headache.

 

[Larry D]

Ok , Everything went well! Thank you so much for your time. This site and you folks are the best ever! I think i will have to tip the scale here for Peter.

 

[Dwarf]

Thanks, Larry. Glad you have solved your problem.

 

[Joan Archer]

Don't know if there is a tutorial here about converting but here is a very good article if you want a good read CNY.
I think it explains the benefits so is useful to know for an external drive even though it was written before Vista came out, hence the mention of XP.

Converting FAT32 to NTFS in Windows XP

 

[Dzomlija]

Ok , Everything went well! Thank you so much for your time. This site and you folks are the best ever! I think i will have to tip the scale here for Peter.

Thanks, Larry. It's always cool to be recognized!