Why do I get a "file too big" error when I transfer files to an external hard drive that has plenty of room?

Question

I am digitizing my video collection and want to put it on an external hard drive. It is a 1TB Western Digital HD. The files are all over 5GB as I am ripping the files with Handbrake and at a very high quality. I use the copy/paste method of transferring them to the HD and when it hits a certain size, it errors and stops the transfer telling me that the file is too big. There is plenty of space on the HD.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks.

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 on a Dell Latitude E6400 32bit.

I have now tried ripping directly to the external harddrive with handbrake and the process freezes at about 60%. It freezes depending on big the file gets and stops at 4.3GB. — LibraryGeekAdam, Nov 14 '12 at 22:03
The external hard drive has a file system type msdos if that matters. — LibraryGeekAdam, Nov 14 '12 at 22:05

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 14 '12 at 22:26

If the drive is formatted as FAT32 (I suppose this is the case since you say it is msdos), then the maximum file size will be approx 4gb: you can have plenty of files on it, but each one can be 4gb max.

You should reformat the hard disk as NTFS (if you want to retain the compatibility with Windows) or EXT3 or EXT4

Why do I get a "file too big" error when I transfer files to an external hard drive that has plenty of room?

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