Disk Utility - File too large message - Please help

Question

Level 1

29 points

Disk Utility - File too large message - Please help

im trying to make a disk image from my macbook so i can upgrade the hard drive.

the disk has 55gig of 60 used.

my external usb hard drive has 90gig spare on it.

when i try to use disk utility to make the disk image to the external drive it runs for a short time then says file too large....

any ideas where im going wrong?

MacBook 2ghz Mac OS X (10.4.7) Logic 7.2.2 / Reaktor 5 / Battery 3

Posted on Feb 16, 2007 5:17 PM

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Answer 1

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Feb 16, 2007 5:17 PM in response to Ian Cashman

Don't know, but why don't you use something like Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper!, etc. to make a bootable clone to the USB HD? Collect everything that's on the USB HD into a uniquely named folder and neither of those apps will touch it while making the clone.

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Answer 2

Feb 16, 2007 5:33 PM in response to Ian Cashman

Hi Ian Cashman;

I hope you have your problem with the file too large solved.

You say you are using 55 GB out of 60 GB, that doesn't leave you very much space for OS X to operate with. Having that disk this full can cause you to have poor performance and leave you open to file corruption. I would suggest that you try and increase your free space from 5 GB to 10 GB is possible. You may also want to boot from your install media and use Disk Utility to repair your system disk just in case.

Allan

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Answer 3

Feb 16, 2007 7:49 PM in response to Ian Cashman

I'm guessing this is the same problem reported earlier by another poster (under the thread named "Copying large file (>4gb) fails - "Error-1309" - what's wrong? "). If your external drive was formatted by the manufacturer using the Windows FAT32 filesystem, it can't handle files of 4 GB or more in size. Examine it using Disk Utility, reformat it as MacOS Extended if necessary.

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Answer 4

Ian Cashman Author

Level 1

29 points

Feb 17, 2007 5:11 AM in response to John Chew

right.. in answer to the 'free up 10 gig' advice, im replacing the hard drive with a 160gig one... hence why im doing this.

ive just spent the morning clearing stuff of my external drive so i can format it for mac os (extended or journaled?)

what im looking to do is move every file (osx included) to the external drive so i can then remove the 60gig hard drive from my macbook, replace it with the 160gig drive i have just purchased, then move all the files back onto it exactly as they were.

i dont want to have to reinstall anything... i just want to clone my existing drive to the new one.

which is the best disk utility method for doing this? (restore? create image?)

in the future im going to be using the external drive to do a monthly back up this way.

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Answer 5

Feb 17, 2007 6:44 AM in response to Ian Cashman

Hi Ian Cashman;

Two suggestions:

First, repair disk so that you know your files are good before you move them.

Second, get either SuperDuper or CCC to move the file. With OS X you can not just do a click and drag. It will not move everything.

Allan

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Answer 6

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Feb 17, 2007 10:53 AM in response to Ian Cashman

which is the best disk utility method for doing this? (restore? create image?

Restore is your answer if you don't want to use CCC or SuperDuper! Creating an image is useless because the image isn't bootable.

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Answer 7

Feb 17, 2007 12:04 PM in response to baltwo

Having read this list, I just bought SuperDuper for $28. I wish I had done that three days ago BEFORE my ibook crashed. Very easy to install/use and I now have a bootable copy on my firewire external HD and best of all, it works.

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Answer 8

Ian Cashman Author

Level 1

29 points

Feb 18, 2007 7:32 AM in response to baltwo

cheers baltwo...

ill try that first... its not as if i, gonna lose anything if it doesnt work.

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Answer 9

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Feb 18, 2007 10:15 AM in response to Ian Cashman

Thanks for the feedback. Now, mark the replies, appropriately. Good computing.

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Answer 10

Ian Cashman Author

Level 1

29 points

Feb 18, 2007 3:20 PM in response to baltwo

right.. after the restore to the new macbook drive all worked fine but ive been left with 3 alias folders in the root drive called :
-etc
-temp
-var

can i delete these?

also... it had renamed the drive to the name of the external drive. ive changed this back to what the original was called. Hopefuly this was the right thing to do. ive heard having a different drive name to whats recorded in the program files etc can be a big no-no

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Answer 11

msuper69

Level 6

8,705 points

Feb 18, 2007 6:42 PM in response to Ian Cashman

You can safely delete those aliases.

You can change the name of your hard drive at any time. My cat keeps sleeping on the keyboard of my MacBook and changes the hard drive name to random strings all the time. 🙂

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Answer 12

Ian Cashman Author

Level 1

29 points

Feb 19, 2007 5:40 AM in response to msuper69

i changed the drive name to what it was before and the computer restarted and all the applications work as id expect.

but... after deleting the alias files the computer will no longer boot. i get a black screen of death.

when i boot from the external backup drive (which boots up fine) and view my internal hard drive there is now a folder called var which is locked.

ive deleted the drive and restored it again from the copy on the external drive and it boots up again fine, but the 3 alias folders are still there looking (to my mind) mysterious and dangerous. i dont know what they are, what they do, or why they have to be there. they were never there before and i dont want them there now.

i think im gonna do a fresh osx install to a blank internal drive then import my files programs and settings during the install from the external drive... i believe this should be easy enough.

any ideas?

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