Copying Files to External Hard Drive

I agree..this is the case for FAT32.

Hi Guys, Thanks for the good advice - and just to let you know, and anyone else who might search the forum for the same problem - it worked!
I reformatted the external drive from its FAT32 format to NTFS and had success in planting the large mpeg onto the drive.
How my dilemma came about was that I had recently purchased one of those Easycap video capture USB devices to capture and copy some old VHS home videos to DVD. By the way, these work a charm.
I ended up with one mpeg of 6.5Gb and wanting to tidy up the fixed hard drive and put them into short term storage onto the external drive prior to some editing, I found it wouldn't play ball in being copied to the external hard drive.
I have found that the exercise of converting video files to DVD is a whole PhD career but in the process have found all sorts of software to convert to various filetypes, trim and cut bits and pieces and trying to fit more than one and a half hours of movie to DVD.
Many thanks for the positive advice.

just copy like 3GB untill u have copied all.

Hey bob, you can try a backup program, did the WD come with one?

you can use picasa to back up to an external drive

did you try to prep the files as if to burn them to a dvd & save a copy to the ex hdd...

Reformat the drive as NTFS. Most of the external drives come formatted as FAT which has a 2gig max filesize.

I think it is problem of diffence of sytem in 'Sectors & Cluster sizes' in NTFS & Fat32

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/clust_Clusters.htm

Seems like the place to ask this;

A while ago I bought a tower to run a preexisting HD, complete with XP OS, so swapped out the 'blank' HD that came with the tower before loading the various new drivers - mother board etc.

The other day, I put the blank HD in an external enclosure (e-SATA+USB2) with the idea of using it as data storage and transfer means.

XP 'detected' and 'installed' the drive. But; it does not show in 'my computer' as a drive or external storage. It does show up in 'system/hardware/device manager' as 'working properly' - but has no "properties" and a format option is not offered (or I can't find it).

So the question is; how do I get to the bloody thing, to format it?

Or; what can I do, aside from swapping it back and doing an XP install on it, then making it slave and reformatting its "C"?

Can't you install it as a slave & make it the "D" drive?

or could be another job for linux. burn a live cd of ubuntu 10.04, run but don't do an install. go to software manager, install Gparted. open Gparted find HDD reformat to NFTS or FAT32 [your choice]

There are other methods, but I can confirm this one as working on my both my 250g EXHDD & old 40g IDE HDD

This SATA don't seem to have the master/slave bridging dingle thingy.

Yeah - been thinking if Ive' got to do an install - it might as well be Ubuntu - which raises the possibility of seeing if the Mac can see it. - which I've not though of.

Keep it a a usb [EX HDD] & run Gparted to re format.

Seagate has some tools you can download to reformat, but they leave some of their back up software at the same time.

course if you do an linux install you can play around with some of the science stuff charlie is always going on about.

http://www.caelinux.com/CMS/

I'm happy with the more normal install using Bit torrent http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/

You'll be happier with the hdd plugged into the bus, or there will be some lag for video or big files or processes [FEA]

having a different OS on different HDD is the way to go, you will have the option to boot into whichever at start up.

you'll be able to reformat & install at the same time, you just need to make sure you know which HDD is which, for safety you can unplug the HDD with XP on it [power off of course]

34.5, Wish I could help but not sure - have had no problems with IDE drives on USB cables and was going to suggest putting the jumper on the "Master" pins and connecting the power last but I don't think you have these options with Sata. Doing a quick Google seems that yours is a common query and I have seen all sorts of answers from using a PCI card to configuring the Sata controller in BIOS. You will see in a search using external/sata/usb/recognition terms.

This one is a good start though http://www.wdc.com/en/products/resources/DriveCompatibilityguide.asp

Thank you both - it's a free time pursuit so there may be a delay in reporting

If you right click "My Computer" select "Manage" and then select "Disk Management" under "Storage" does the new HDD show up there?

Note: If doing the above results in a pop up saying windows needs to write a key to the disk then say yes, otherwise you won't be able to do anything to the drive.

If the HDD does not show under "Disk Management" then Windows picked the wrong device driver and you need to use the "Update Driver" feature in "Device Manager". Might be hard to find the corect driver entry as it most likely will not show in "disk drives", it will be the one of the ones that disappears when the USB is unpluged.

SATA uses no jumpers. It might help to temporarily mount the new hdd directly to the MB and format it there before putting it in the USB external. If your current OS does not boot with new hdd connected to MB the ypu need to adjust drive boot order in the BIOS.