FAT stands for File Allocation Table, a computer file system architecture used mainly on portable devices now due to its relative simplicity and portability across multiple file system architectures. However, it does have many limitations. For one, there is a limitation on partition sizes. FAT32 has a 2TB limit on partition size while FAT16 has a 4GB limit on partition size. My removable hard drive was one partition of 596 GB, clearly well below the 2TB threshold. But there are also limitations on the file size. The Microsoft website confirms that the file-size limit on FAT32 is (2^32)-1, one byte less than exactly 4GB.
So how did I get around the problem? As far as I could tell, there were three solutions:
1. Format my removable hard drive to NTFS. This will limit its applicability to Windows but will solve any file transfer issues in the future. However, I will have to back up my files on the hard drive before I do this. This will take some time since I don't have any other medium to store my 200GB+ of information already on there.
2. Burn the image onto a DVD. This is all fine except I don't fancy carrying around a bunch of CDs.
3. Reduce the size of the file or split the file into multiple smaller files. This will solve the file transfer issue with just a little more hassle.
I decided to go with Option 3. I had on my computer a powerful and simple freeware called HJ-Split which does exactly that. It splits one file into multiple smaller files of sizes I decide. I have only used it before to merge files that have been split but doing the reverse is definitely possible. It took about half an hour to split the single size into 7 smaller files of ~1GB each but afterwards transferring the files was a cinch. In the future, I just need to recombine the files if I ever want it again.
By the way, you can download HJ-Split here:
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