Weird Windows problem - 'no space'

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Weird Windows problem - 'no space'

Post by OneWorld »

I have made an image of drive c: using Macrium 7, it is shown as being 152GIG

I keep an archive on a separate drive which shows it has 254GIG free.

I try and copy the image file across and Windows says there is not enough space, and I need an extra 151GIG?
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Re: Weird Windows problem - 'no space'

Post by BJG145 »

Is the destination NTFS? Eg FAT32 doesn't support that file size. If it's NTFS, you could try using 7Zip to create an archive on the destination drive instead; one suggestion I've come across.
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Re: Weird Windows problem - 'no space'

Post by OneWorld »

BJG145 wrote:Is the destination NTFS? Eg FAT32 doesn't support that file size. If it's NTFS, you could try using 7Zip to create an archive on the destination drive instead; one suggestion I've come across.

Yes the destination is NTFS

At present I am scavenging any excess from drive c: and am then going to try an make and image sent directly to the drive that Windows says doesn't have enough room (although there should be 152GIG spare) to see what happens

If that doesn't work I shall use something like a AOMEI Partition app to see if there is something 'odd' about the drive, if so I shall delete the partition and create a new one
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Re: Weird Windows problem - 'no space'

Post by merlyn »

OneWorld wrote:I try and copy the image file across and Windows says there is not enough space, and I need an extra 151GIG?

The way the numbers have come out there -- is it that Windows wants 152GB of contiguous space? It can only find 1GB of contiguous space. If your archive drive has been well used it will be fragmented so, although there is 254GB free, it's scattered across the drive. A drive image is not your usual file and I imagine you have to use the backup software to manage images.

I saw in another thread you have a Linux boot CD. You could look at it in Linux. There's gparted for managing partitions.

I've done this sort of thing a lot but anything low level like this still makes me a bit nervous and I would clone any drive I was going to touch the partitions on.
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Re: Weird Windows problem - 'no space'

Post by OneWorld »

merlyn wrote:
OneWorld wrote:I try and copy the image file across and Windows says there is not enough space, and I need an extra 151GIG?

The way the numbers have come out there -- is it that Windows wants 152GB of contiguous space? It can only find 1GB of contiguous space. If your archive drive has been well used it will be fragmented so, although there is 254GB free, it's scattered across the drive. A drive image is not your usual file and I imagine you have to use the backup software to manage images.

I saw in another thread you have a Linux boot CD. You could look at it in Linux. There's gparted for managing partitions.

I've done this sort of thing a lot but anything low level like this still makes me a bit nervous and I would clone any drive I was going to touch the partitions on.

Yes that makes sense except I have formatted it, and anyway I thought under Win10 defragmentation was a thing of the past anyway. But I do have some partition software so might as well give that a try
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Re: Weird Windows problem - 'no space'

Post by wireman »

OneWorld wrote:I have made an image of drive c: using Macrium 7, it is shown as being 152GIG

I keep an archive on a separate drive which shows it has 254GIG free.

I try and copy the image file across and Windows says there is not enough space, and I need an extra 151GIG?

I'm not very familiar with Windows but is the file sparse (does Explorer size and size on disk show a similar size)?
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Re: Weird Windows problem - 'no space'

Post by OneWorld »

wireman wrote:
OneWorld wrote:I have made an image of drive c: using Macrium 7, it is shown as being 152GIG

I keep an archive on a separate drive which shows it has 254GIG free.

I try and copy the image file across and Windows says there is not enough space, and I need an extra 151GIG?

I'm not very familiar with Windows but is the file sparse (does Explorer size and size on disk show a similar size)?

Problem solved. I used some partition software to deleted the partition and re-create it and the space is now available. It seemed to be unallocated space.
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Re: Weird Windows problem - 'no space'

Post by n o i s e f l e ur »

OneWorld wrote:
Yes that makes sense except I have formatted it, and anyway I thought under Win10 defragmentation was a thing of the past anyway.

Not quite . . . manual defrag is deprecated and no longer available but the OS runs its own defrag routines transparently in the background. The thing to keep in mind is these routines don't care about maintaining contiguous free space and are tuned for file-access according the the OS' preference - so they're not actually "defrag" as traditionally thought of.
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