Monday, November 15, 2010

Error Copying File or Folder. Cannot Copy. There is not enough free disk space.

I got this error recently when i was trying to copy a large file (~8GB) to my external USB hard drive. This did not make any sense to me as i had 120+ GB available free space on my hard disk.

I spent some time and it turns out i am not able to copy file because my hard disk was formatted with FAT32 format. FAT32 has 4GB file size limit and this is why i was not able copy this large file. So the solution is to convert your FAT32 to NTFS format. I already had lot of data on my hard disk so formatting with NTFS was not an option. Luckily, i found that Windows gives us  a convert command to convert FAT32 drives to NTFS while keeping all your data intact. You can use following command on the DOS prompt.

convert <drive> /FS:NTFS /X

Here <drive> is the drive (for example, F:) that you want to convert to NTFS. In my case, i got another error that it found some error on the drive and suggested to run CHKDSK. I ran CHKDSK as follows and then re-ran Convert command as given above and everything worked like a charm.

chkdsk <drive> /F /X

Here <drive> is the drive (for example F:) that you want to CHKDSK.

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