Images won't copy and paste to external drive

I have an 80GB external hard drive which I can connect using firewire or USB 2 and either way if I try to copy and paste an Acronis image from drive D to the external drive I keep getting the message that there is insufficient space on the external drive to do this. The image is in 2 parts and totals 7.25 GB but even if I try to copy only the first part of the image which is 4 GB or the second part which is 3.25 GB it says I have insufficient space on the external drive even though there is 40 GB of free space. This happens even after running a check disk to fix errors on the external drive. It happens no matter how many check disks I do. There appears to be something peculiar about the format of Acronis Images that causes the computer the computer to think there is not enough space on the external drive to copy and paste the image when there is in fact 10 times the required free space. Has anyone else experienced this or is it something wrong only with my computer?

I can by the way copy other large files to the external hard disk as I just copied and pasted a 4.12 GB file to the drive but just prior to doing this the Acronis Image could not be copied and pasted.

 

From the information you have given I cannot see that this is a TI problem. The image is just a file and can contain whatever it wants.

Is your external drive partitioned, is there really 80GB free on the partition you are copying to?

 

There is definitely 41 GB free space on the external drive and even copying and pasting a 4 GB Part 1 of a split Acronis image gets me the error message yet I can copy and paste other files of 20 GB to the external drive with no problem. The Acronis image is a fresh one and not corrupt and anyhow it has happened with other earlier Acronis images which made me wander if it was a problem specific to my computer or a general problem with Acronis images. There is no use doing check disks to fix any file system problems as the problem remains but only with Acronis images. Very strange and on the surface it looks like there is something about Acronis Images that confuses my computer yet I've had no trouble writing the image to DVDs only the external hard drive and it only happens with Acronis Images.

I suspect that the computer somehow gets confused by the fact that the Image is split as I have just discovered that it only happens if I try and copy and paste part 1 of the Acronis image but there is no problem with part 2 even though both parts are close to equal in size. The computer apparently gets confused by the fact that part 1 is part of a whole image. It looks to me like the computer sees that the 2 part Acronis image is an image made of a 70 GB hard drive and thinks the image is 70 GB! I in fact have 2 Acronis images in two separate files and both are split images with 2 parts to each and it happens when I try to copy and paste part 1 of either image which means it is a problem specific to split Acronis images and would happen on other people’s computers as well! A strange discovery.

 

Is your external drive formated as Fat32, as almost all are? If so, you are most likely not reading the size of the other files that you are using as test examples correctly. It would sound like you are running into a file size limitation of Fat32.

 

Yes I use Fat 32 on the external hard drive so I can connect it to other people's computers that don't run Windows XP. You have no doubt solved the puzzle. Could you tell me what is the largest size an individual file can be on a Fat 32 disk? If it's 4 GB that would explain why I can't copy and paste parts 1 of the two images which are just over 4 GB but can copy and paste parts 2 of the images which are just under 4 GB. I am therefore guessing that 4 GB or thereabouts is a limit on Fat 32 individual files. This shows how little I know about computers but if you confirm my guess is correct I will have learnt that little bit more.

 

In theory, the largest size is 4 Gigabytes minus one byte. You may want to try splitting at 3.9 Gig. or thereabouts. Wdorrmann posted information on this in the past.