Vista Tutorial - back up recovery d question

Hello all, I want to back up my recovery d. I have a old hard drive i am using for backing up. It is connected with a usb to ide wire and is being used as a external drive. It has 13.9 gb free space. The d recovery is 9.89 gb. When i try to copy it to the (external) hard drive i get a message that the factory.win is too large for the destination file system. Not sure what this means or how to fix it. Thanks for any comments. Ps I know this is a hokey set up but what the heck it's free space! LOL

Attachment 9089

All it means is you need to get a bigger external HDD. Maybe it needs more free space.

Or you can delete(or transfer to DVD) whatever is in it to make more room.

Coolnewyorker, 13.9 is free and the recovery is 9.25. Why would this not be enough? Thanks for the reply.

Chances are high that the external drive to which you want to copy the filr is formatted with FAT32, for which the maximum filesize is 4GB. You will need to first format the external drive as NTFS, which isn't always supported by some external flash drives.

Dzomlija, I think you are right it is fat32. Thanks much! (edit) It is a actual internal hd being used as a external. Can you give me a how to ntfs?

What you need to do then is copy all the contents of the external drive to a temp location on another drive, then format it as NTFS. If you can't empty the drive first, then try using CONVERT from an Administrative Command Prompt to convert it to NTFS.

Although backing up the contents first then formatting directly to NTFS is the safer option...

your reply was way fast before my edit. LOL! Thanks i will give it a try.

@Dzom...what if he just gets a much bigger ext. HDD, does he still need to re-format? Or reformatting automatically makes it bigger already for successful backup.

Which is effectively easier to do?

You're not reading all the posts, are you, neither do you much understand the basics of HDDs:

1. A new hard hard disk must always be formatted, regardless.
2. Formatting does not automatically make it bigger. The only thing that can do that is compression or partitioning, and then you're also limited only to the maximum physical capacity of the drive.
3. Regardless of the capacity or amount of freespace of the drive, if it is formatted as FAT32, Larry would still not be able copy a file larger than 4GB - that is the maximum filesize limit imposed on the FAT32 structures.

Ok, I am in the process of formatting to ntfs. I think i should have changed the allocation size as it is set at 4096 ? Just a rookie here so please hang with me.