FAT32 to NTFS Conversion Was the Beginning of My Troubles

The beginning of this week was the beginning of my frustrations with my computer that have lasted the entire week and have now extended to the weekend. I have a 250GB Western Digital Passport drive that I’ve been using now for a number of months as an extension of my laptop’s minuscule 60GB internal hard drive.

I had a need to grab a large 20GB+ SQL .bak backup file from a client so we could restore it back to a test environment and begin doing some recon on the database and testing for a needed upgrade soon.

We ran into the error that there wasn’t enough available space on the drive to move the file. That was weird as there was more than 200GB available space on the drive. I did some research and found out that FAT32 drive has a 4GB limit on the size of file it can transfer. Thus begins the process of conversion to NTFS on that drive.

I began moving all my files off my drive and onto another portable 500GB drive. I then started receiving a lot of errors while trying to transfer the files. I thought I grabbed screen shots of the errors but can’t find them now, so who knows where they are now. It seems I’ve lost everything at some point.

After a couple of days I was able to get the majority of my files off my drive and began the process of converting it to NTFS. First I did a quick format and erase to NTFS. Then I ran chkdsk on the drive. Then I did a long format and conversion to NTFS.

Let’s just say that for a 250GB drive all of those steps take a number of hours if not a day itself.

Technorati Tags: SQL, NTFS, FAT32, USB Drive, Western Digital Passport