Posts Tagged ‘hard’
“No space left on device” error on empty drives
It may occur that when you try to copy files from your hard disk to an external device such as an external HDD or a USB key, you get an error stating that there was no free space left on your device although you just erased everything from it to make some. This is most likely due to limitations of the file system your drive uses – newer drives might already use the NTFS file system while older will still use FAT32 or even FAT16.
The thing is that FAT32 formatted drives only support files up to a maximum size of 4GB – for example if you try to put an image file of 6 GB onto an external, FAT32 formatted hard drive of 320 GB with 100 GB of those still free and not in use, the copying will fail. To change this, you have to format the target drive to the NTFS file system.
Formatting will erase all data on a drive, so backup everything you have on it beforehand. Afterwards, right-click the drive in your file browser and choose Format….
On the appearing window, there will likely be an FAT file system on the File System drop-down menu (if it already says NTFS there, this guide won’t solve your problems). Before you change anything, double-check that you picked the right drive. Then change the file system to NTFS and click Start.
Change Drive Letter on Windows 7 to Resolve Conflicts
By working with different drives it sometimes may occur that two drives are given the same drive letter – usually this is not the case but it may always happen due to bugs. It is also possible that a drive loses its letter “spontaneously”. What results is that one or both of them is/are not shown on Computer anymore. To resolve this error, a new letter has to be assigned to the drive with the help of the Disk Management. Right-click Computer and choose Manage. On the left pane, select Storage > Disk Management and you will see the connected drives listed in the main screen.
To change or assign a drive letter, right-click target drive and select Change Drive Letter and Paths…. On the window that pops up choose Add… or Change…. Afterwards select a new drive letter from the drop-down menu:
Remember that you choose a letter that is not already used by another drive – to ensure that, choose one on the end of the alphabet. Your computer won’t have had the chance to fill all the letters up to there already. Usually it should not be possible to choose a letter that is already in use anyway, but it is good to always double-check things like these if the above error should occur.