Anyone Had This Happen Before?

[Lee]

I have a 6 gigabyte zip file sat on my desktop right now and, im trying to transfer it over to a portable 120gb hard drive.

The drive currently has over 90GBs of free space on it however, when i try to move this .zip file from my desktop to the drive, im being told there isnt enough free space.

Anyone know why this could be happening?

Regards,

Lee

[HotMaleVideos]

Can the contents be cut in half or into thirds for the transfer?

My immediate thought is Windows freaking out over file size (for no reason, other than just being Windows). A phantom of the old 2 GB file size limit.

[Lee]

It probably can but that means having to extract and re-zip everything, which is going to take about 4 hours LOL

Regards,

Lee

[Chilihost]

Lee, try unzipping the file directly to your portable disk.

[Lee]

Oh, i didnt even think of trying that LOL

Thanks Luke

Regards,

Lee

[gaybucks_chip]

Two thoughts here:

As long as the drive you're writing to is formatted in NTFS, then you can copy a file of any size you like... we have zip files that are 10, 20, 50mb and larger stored on USB external drives. If it's formatted with FAT32 (earlier versions of Win98, or if you happened to choose FAT32 when you formatted the drive) then it won't allow a copy of larger than 2 gigs, and the error you would get would be exactly what you're getting.

Big "However":

We discovered the hard way that there is a known bug in all versions of Windows that causes intermittent unpredictable behavior when moving large files to and from USB or Firewire external drives. I don't have the reference for it, but it is in the Microsoft knowledgebase. What we've seen happen is the directory structure gets corrupted and the entire directory becomes unreadable (Windows reports "Directory is corrupt or unreadable) or, worst case, the directory structure is damaged so severely that Windows reports that the drive is not formatted.

I recommend being extremely careful writing to USB or Firewire drives. Don't do multiple writes to a single USB or Firewire drive at the same time (meaning, copying files from more than one computer, or from multiple windows or processes on a single computer to a single drive) Don't write a large file to a drive while doing multiple reads (as in, copying a large file to the drive while rendering from a file on the drive to another file on the drive). This problem tends to occur with files larger than 2 gigs, but I've seen it happen also on drives formatted with FAT32 and files smaller than 2 gigs.

We used to have these failures all the time until we started taking these precautions... and we still have them once in a while.

The good news is there's an amazing package called Get Data Back from Runtime Software (runtime.org) that can recover nearly 100% of the data from drives corrupted this way (and many others). It is totally nondestructive, doesn't write *anything* to the damaged drive, just reads and copies to another drive. It's saved my ass a number of times, and it's only like $100 or something.

For robust storage of large files, I recommend the Buffalo Terastation, a standalone RAID array that's surprisingly cheap ($800 or so for a 1TB RAID-5). We had one drive die in our Terastation, it beeped a warning, we restarted in safe mode, and were able to replace the bad drive, and it automatically rebuilt all the missing info without any loss of data (or loss of access to the data while we were rebuilding.)