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Insufficient memory converting FAT32 to NTFS (Windows XP)

I'm converting a 500GB FAT32 drive to NTFS on Windows XP. Some of the files on the target drive are 3 or 4GB. I'm using Windows' convert utility as follows:

convert G: /FS:NTFS /NoSecurity /X

Eventually, it fails with (I've changed some dir names to silly names for privacy reasons):

XYZ.
Backup.
DevMachine1.tib.
Insufficient Memory
Error converting file DEVMAC~1.TIB.

The DevMachine1.tib file is one of the 4GB files in question. It is failing with "insufficient memory", presumably because it's trying to load the file in its entirety into memory and failing (although, of course, I don't know that for sure).

I do not have another drive available to temporarily copy the data to (I have about 350GB of these large files on the drive).

I can temporarily compress the files (e.g. rar) but the time it takes to do this is prohibitive.

I could temporarily break the files into smaller chunks and put them back together again after the conversion is complete, but I'd rather not deal with that if I don't have to.

Given that I don't have a second drive to copy data to, and I only have 2GB of RAM on my system, and there are files >2GB on the disk, how can I convert this disk to NTFS? Is there a better utility that somebody can recommend?

Thanks!

Jackie Man

From my google search, "insufficient memory" error is not caused by "it's trying to load the file in its entirety into memory and failing".

The actual reason is the size of the volume bitmap of your 500GB drive has exceeded your 2GB limit of memory.

The calculation of volume bitmap size is as follows:-

volume bitmap size = (Volume Size) / (Bytes Per Cluster) / 8 bytes

Source: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/winserverfiles/thread/c97ba00d-2d16-4149-a37a-1af6b568cd2b

JasonCipriani

ASKER

Thanks for looking into it. The drive has 32KB clusters so:

499,983,089,664 / 32,768 / 8 = 1,907,284.12

That's only 1.82MB for this drive, if I've done the calculation correctly, which shouldn't be a problem.

Also I ran convert with /V and it's printing the names of the files as it converts (I'm not referring to the initial chkdsk phase). It seems to have successfully scanned a large number of small files before it failed on the first large file it encountered.

I've been able to locate a machine with 6GB of RAM; I'm going to try using 'convert' on that machine. I'm not going to get frustrated unless that doesn't work. I'll post the outcome here.

Thanks!

akahan

Can I ask a stupid question? Since the maximum file size on a FAT32 volume is 4GB minus 1 byte (i.e,. just UNDER 4GB) how do you have 4GB files on the volume you're trying to convert to NTFS?

JasonCipriani

ASKER

The files are 512 bytes less than 4GB (4,294,966,784 bytes). It was just easier to type 4GB than 3.999999523162841796875GB. :)

akahan

You might want to give EASUS a try. It's free, and has a good reputation; I've had positive experiences with it in the past:

http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/convert-partition.htm

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

JasonCipriani

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