IT Professionals

Flash Drive Frustration

Posted by on Sep 16, 2008 | 3 Comments

Today, OLAWOLE asks:

I have an 8gb flash drive and tried to copy a 5gb movie to it. I could not! Can you tell me why please?
Second, I tried to convert the flash drive to NTFS and it was not successful either. What is the cause please?

While I cannot state for sure what the problem might be, the following possibilities come to my mind:

  • Is the drive formatted as FAT32? This is by far not ideal for large file transfers. If memory serves, the file transfer limit is 4GBs per file for FAT32.
  • To convert the drive to NTFS, you can try the following advice in this video.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1010783/format_usb_flash_drive_fat32_to_ntfs.swf" width="350" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Do you have an IT-related question? Perhaps you are just burnt out on writing on the walls with crayons? Whatever the comments may be, drop me a line, and you too can “Just Ask Matt!” Please address comments to the comments section above, my email address is for questions – thanks!

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com leftystrat

    also keep in mind that down the road somewhere, your flash drive will die. I don’t know why but flash memory has a finite amount of writes, after which it won’t work.

    Don’t forget to back up.

  • https://www.scanlen.com Michael

    The limit on FAT32 is 2Gb for files sizes.

    For those of you who have PS3′s or XBox’s and would like to have an external drive (say 80Gb) connected to the console to load all your photos/music/movies you have two options. Remember the consoles will only read FAT32 formatted drives.

    Option 1: Create 3 partitions on the drive – 32Gb, 32Gb, 16Gb. As Fat32 can only offically handle the maximum partition size of 32Gb.

    Option 2 (my preferred method): Go to the following website and download this guys FAT32 large hard drive formatter: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm
    By following his steps you are able to have 1 (ONE) partition the full size of the hard drive formatted as FAT32.

    It works like a charm and now I don’t have to remember what partition I saved which movie/mp3/photo.

    Like Matt said if you want to copy larger than 2Gb files onto a device it will have to be formatted NTFS and NOT FAT32.

  • http://www.bytehead.org/blog/ Bryan Price

    Yep. After 4GB is the file size. Can’t remember why off the top of my head. Since 4GB is 65536 (10000h) squared, and it’s FAT16 for 16 bits… I seem to recall a FAT32 (OS/2? Too long ago…).

    But yes, you’ll need to convert to NTFS I got a 160GB portable drive and had to convert it to NTFS. I just used the command line CONVERT.EXE