Fix “The File Is Too Large For The Destination File System” Error On any USB Drives | USB is Empty, it Says Not Enough Space | 32GB | PENDRIVE

                    Sometimes, when you try to move/copy new files (larger in size) onto USB flash drive, the error message appears like “there is not enough space on removable disk. you need an additional space”. And, if you look at the USB, you will see empty space. Even though there is plenty of free space available on the USB drive you will be not allowed to save new data onto it.

          

 

1. Plug in your USB flash drive. For safety, take a backup of all files on it (e.g. copy them to your computer) before proceeding to the next step.

2. OPTIONAL – this step enables write caching on the USB flash drive which optimizes it for quicker performance and is more suited to NTFS. You don’t have to do this step – if you aren’t too bothered about speed of data transfers skip to step 3:

• W7 or earlier – press Start then right click ‘Computer’ and select ‘Manage’ to open the Computer Management window.
• W8/10 – right click on the Start button then click on Computer Management to open the Computer Management window.
• In the left panel, choose Device Manager (under System Tools).
• In the right panel, double click ‘Disk drives’ to expand the list of devices – your USB drive should be listed there:

 

• Right click your USB flash drive and choose ‘Properties’ to open its Properties window then select the Policies tab.
• Choose the ‘Better Performance’ (or ‘Optimize for performance’ in old versions of Windows) option then press OK and close Computer Management:

 

Now you can change the file system on the drive to NTFS in the next step.

3. Convert The Drive To NTFS – there are two alternative ways to do this – the first tries to keep all data on the USB drive (no guarantees) but the second will delete all data on the USB drive. Whichever method you choose, if you didn’t take a backup earlier, do it now to avoid data loss.

Method 1 – Conversion

• Click ‘Start’ and type CMD into the search box. Right click on the ‘CMD’ program in the search results and select ‘Run as administrator’.
• You may now see a User Account Control message asking “Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?”. Click on ‘Yes’ to confirm.
• This will open an elevated (Administrator) level Command Prompt window
• In the command prompt window, type convert x: /fs:ntfs then press Enter where x: is the drive letter of your flash drive.

E.g. in the example below, my USB flash drive is letter i: so, to convert it to NTFS, I typed convert i: /fs:ntfs

• The process indicates when conversion is complete:

 

Note: if there was not enough free space on the Flash drive, the conversion will fail – either delete some data from it and try again or skip to the next method which deletes all data on the drive.

• Close the Command Prompt window. The drive is now using NTFS so you can transfer files larger than 4GB to it.

 

Steps to Convert USB File System from FAT to NTFS Without Losing Data:

• Hit Windows and R keys at a time
• You will reach Run window
• Type CMD in the search tab and click Enter
• Next, type convert x: /fs:ntfs (x -> drive letter of your USB)
• Press Enter key