I had just recently purchased a Buffalo external hard drive with 250GB capacity, to hold the photos I’ve been taking with my new Nikon D60 camera. But since the space was there I figured I’d use it for storing my other non-office files as well. That is, until I tried copying a file that was 5GB in size.

I was stumped when Windows told me the disk I was copying into did not have enough space for the 5GB file, which was strange because there was over 200GB left in the drive. A quick search through the Buffalo forums revealed that the drive—connected via the USB port—was formatted in FAT and therefore had the 4GB file size limit. The thing to do was to format the drive into NTSC. Doing this would limit file access to the drive by only Windows XP/Vista systems, but that was what I had anyway. But how could I do that when Windows only lets you format USB drives in FAT?

GetUSB.info taught me how. The illustrated step-by-step on how to format any USB drive as NTFS can be found on THIS PAGE. So if you ever have the same problem as I did, head on down there now.

BUT—and this is a very big but—what if you already have files in the USB drive and you don’t want to erase all that is there by re-formatting? You can convert FAT to NTFS directly by following this guide on Microsoft TechNET. However it requires entering commands into a DOS/command prompt window, so if you’re not comfortable with that, you’re better off finding a computer with enough space to hold what you have on your external USB drive, copy everything off, and do the format as suggested by GetUSB.info.

Happy formatting!