WD 360 GB External Harddrive Copy Error and Solution

Last year I purchased Western Digital 360GB external USB harddrive. I tried to copy a big file but it said that I don’t have enough space on my hard disk. I wondered why it was throwing an error as I had enough space on my external drive and also computer drive (in case copy command need it for buffer????) I searched internet and found that if the hard disk is formatted as FAT32, it will not allow the file greater than 4 GB size. So what is the solution?

I have to format the hard disk with NTFS option. but how to do it? I found a command to format it. Here are the steps

Note: Please make a backup of your hard drive before converting FAT32 to NTFS.

Go to Start > Run… > Type “cmd” and click “OK”. It will open up command window.

At the command prompt type “convert <drive letter>: /FS:NTFS”. Replace <drive letter> with your drive letter. For me, it was “J” so I typed “convert J: /FS:NTFS” and hit Enter key.

It will ask you the label for your drive. I was bit confused about what to write about label. This label is a custom name you are giving to the drive. For example, C: has default label of “Local Drive”. Enter this label name for your drive and press Enter

It will take some time to convert to NTFS.

That’s easy but during this process I encountered error.

 C:\Documents and Settings\Vishal Monpara>convert J: /FS:NTFS
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Enter current volume label for drive J: VMONPARA
Volume VMONPARA created 4/26/2009 12:24 PM
Volume Serial Number is ****-****
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
312,492,320 KB total disk space.
21,600 KB in 152 hidden files.
103,936 KB in 3,246 folders.
61,001,632 KB in 29,763 files.
251,365,120 KB are available.
 
32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
9,765,385 total allocation units on disk.
7,855,160 allocation units available on disk.
 
This drive is dirty and cannot be converted. You will need to
clear the dirty bit on this drive by running CHKDSK /F or allowing
AUTOCHK to run on it the next time you reboot.
The conversion failed.
J: was not converted to NTFS 

So now I run command as per instructions given in the failure message. At the same prompt, type “chkdsk /f <drive letter>:” and then hit enter. I got following message

 C:\Documents and Settings\Vishal Monpara>chkdsk /f J:
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume VMONPARA created 4/26/2009 12:24 PM
Volume Serial Number is ****-****
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
312,492,320 KB total disk space.
21,600 KB in 152 hidden files.
103,936 KB in 3,246 folders.
61,001,632 KB in 29,763 files.
251,365,120 KB are available.
32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
9,765,385 total allocation units on disk.
7,855,160 allocation units available on disk. 

Now I again tried to convert FAT32 to NTFS and it worked with success.

 C:\Documents and Settings\Vishal Monpara>convert J: /FS:NTFS
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Enter current volume label for drive J: VMONPARA
Volume VMONPARA created 4/26/2009 12:24 PM
Volume Serial Number is ****-****
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
312,492,320 KB total disk space.
21,600 KB in 152 hidden files.
103,936 KB in 3,246 folders.
61,001,632 KB in 29,763 files.
251,365,120 KB are available.</code>
 
32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
9,765,385 total allocation units on disk.
7,855,160 allocation units available on disk.
 
Determining disk space required for file system conversion...
Total disk space:              312568641 KB
Free space on volume:          251365120 KB
Space required for conversion:  496058 KB
Converting file system
Conversion complete