I am trying to extract a 4.6 GBso file to my external hard drive but I keep getting the message WinRAR message There is not enough space on disk, Write error: only NTFS file system supports files larger than 4 GB. Can someone help me with this?
I am presuming you are using Windows XP. It seems that your external hard drive must be formatted with the FAT32 filesystem. Did it come ready formatted when you bought it? Many external hard drives use FAT32 to make it easier to swap the drive between computers using different operating systems. It is a limitation of FAT32 that no file can be bigger than 4 GB. (Actually 4 GB minus 1 byte). If a WinRAR operation would result in a file which breaks this limitation, you will see the message you described. It does not necessarily mean that you are running out of space on the disk. You can tell which system it is using by right clicking on the drive in My Computer and selecting "properties" from the menu that appears. You will see a pie chart showing used/free space, and just above this will be information about the file system. If you want to store files which are bigger than 4 GB you will have to change the file system to NTFS. There are two ways of doing this. (1) If you don't mind losing the data already on the disk, or if you have space to temporarily move it somewhere else, you can just format the disk, specifying NTFS as the filesystem. -OR- (2) You can convert the filesystem to NTFS while the data remains there. This can take a while if there is much data to convert. Also, it is one way only. You cannot convert an NTFS disk or partition back to FAT32. Probably a good idea to defragment first. Not a fun task if the disk is nearly full. Full instructions and screen shots of both procedures here:- http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/tips/advanced/ntfs.mspx
Yea it is a 300 GB hard drive but it only had about 50 GB of files on it. Also well it effect any thing since I converted it to NTFS? Like I wont be ablt to download anything to it?
The actual files already on the disk will be just the same as they were before, and you can use it just the same as before. Before, when it was FAT32, you would not have been able to get a file bigger than 4 GB onto the disk, whether it was by extracting from a WinRAR archive, or by gradually downloading a big file, or by copying from an NTFS partition, or whatever. Now you can. Before, when it was FAT32, if you had started downloading a file of -- let's say -- 5 GB, it would have started off OK, but when it got to the limit, Windows would have bombed out the download by coming up with repeated disk space errors. Now, with NTFS, the limit is 16 exabytes (16 billion GB), or the size of the disk, whichever comes first! The only problem I can think of is that MS-DOS and related operating systems, and that includes Windows 95, 98 and ME, will not read an NTFS disk without having special software added, so you would have problems if you tried to plug your disk into a computer running one of those OSes. Dunno about Macs.
