Can't download over 4 gb

[nirvanaking95]

Okay, Hi ...

Well I've been having a problem with this file and I wanna know how to fix it so... the problem:

As you can see in the picture below... (The Problem that has occured.)

Well I want to download Fallout 3 But it's a 5.52 gb file, and I have 10 gb space free... so it says your file is larger than 4 gb download in a different driver.

Well, can anyone show me how to fix it? I looked in options, I didn't see it... but maybe I didn't look hard enough.

Well... Please help me guys, THANKS!

-Cheers!

Edited July 26, 2009 by nirvanaking95 (see edit history)

[kluelos]

This is a fairly easy fix, it just seems scarier than it is.

You're trying to download to a disk drive that is formatted under the FAT32 file system. In that system, no single file can be larger than 4 GB - which seemed fantastically huge at the time it was created. A file system is the basic pattern that defines how data is allocated, written to and read from a disk drive.

What you need to do is download that torrent to a drive which is formatted with the NTFS file system -- which, ironically, is considerably OLDER than FAT32, but which can accommodate much larger files. The easiest way to do this is to simply convert all of your existing drives to NTFS. Microsoft includes a utility, helpfully named "convert", which does exactly this and comes with Windows.

This is a one-way conversion, FAT32 to NTFS. If you want to go back the other way, you are on your own. There is no good reason to do that. Don't do that.

I have never had a conversion fail or damage data. Nevertheless, it's prudent to back up irreplaceable data. not so much because it's at risk as because you probably haven't made any other backup of it anyway and need to do that. You do need some free space on the drive you're going to convert, but the utility won't start if there isn't enough space.

When you do the conversion, it is transparent. You can't tell that it happened. Everything still works the same way, except that now you don't get that error message for very large files. All of your applications will continue to work just as they have, there will be no change in anything.

There are three MS file systems: FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS. MSDos used FAT16 way back when, and the largest partition size that it supports is about 32 MB. Windows NT came out next, and introduced NTFS as an option. If you wanted to use MSDOS/Win3.11 and WinNT on the same system, then you would need a FAT16 drive to boot from. Win3.11 could not read an NTFS drive, but WinNT could read a FAT16 drive.

Win95B introduced FAT32. It supported larger partitions and files than FAT16, but it was an oddball because other versions could not read FAT32. If you wanted a multiboot system, again your boot drive had to be FAT16 because it's the only filesystem that all three could read. Win95 could not read NTFS and WinNT could not read FAT32, but there were third-party utilities that allowed this. You still couldn't boot 95 on an NTFS drive or NT on a FAT32 drive, though. The archetypal mutliboot system used a very small FAT16 drive to boot all of the OS's, then separate partitions for the various %windisk%'s. Vista made this mandatory by refusing to share a partition with any other OS -- one of it's biggest flaws. Win7 unfortunately does the same.

WinXP can read all three. By default it uses FAT32, but can be made to always use NTFS. When you first format a disk using XP's FDISK utility, you generally have a choice of which filesystem to use. I recommend you use a third-party utility called GDISK to do all of your initial formatting and partitioning, instead of FDISK. You don't need it for the conversion, though.