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Almost every user sooner or later encounters the error “the file is too large for the final file system”. This message appears while writing data to a USB flash drive. How to fix this problem, we will consider further.

Reasons for the error

The reason for this error is quite simple. Most of the flash drives sold today have the FAT32 file system, which is not designed for files larger than 4 GB. As a result, if the user tries to write information on the USB flash drive that exceeds this amount, a corresponding error will occur.

Important! FAT32 is not suitable for creating bootable USB drives with newer versions of Windows (starting from Winows XP).

How do I fix “The file is too large for the destination file system”?

There are several methods that can help you quickly resolve the error that has occurred.

Format the flash drive

Changing the format of a USB flash drive from FAT32 to NTFS is a quick and radical way to fix the error. The main thing is to move important data from it to another medium or PC in order to avoid the loss of valuable information.

To format you need:

1. Open “My Computer”.
2. Right-click on the drive.
3. Select “Format” in the context menu.
4. In the window that appears, find the “File system” item and select NTFS in the drop-down window.
5. Click on the “Start” button and confirm the action.

If the drive is used with devices that do not support NTFS, the error can be corrected by formatting the drive to ExFAT. Most likely, this format will be supported by the device, but the restrictions on the file size will increase.

There is another option, how to change the file system and not resort to formatting. This is done through the command line. Enough:

1. Open the command line interface by pressing the Win + R keys or via “Start”.
2. Register the convert command (drive letter): / fs: ntfs. For example, convert G: / fs: ntfs…
3. Press Enter.

When the conversion is complete, you can write large files to disk.

Use programs to split large files into parts

If you need to create a bootable USB flash drive with the operating system, but an error window appears that the file is too large, you can try using special programs to separate the files. You can use the following utilities:

1. WinSetupFromUSB, which splits large files into pieces and merges them during installation.
2. Rufus, which creates UEFI flash drives in NTFS (you should turn off Secure Boot before using it).

You can also split a large file using WinRAR, 7-Zip. For this you need:

1. Select the required file, open the context menu and click “Add to archive”.
2. In the window that opens with the settings for creating an archive, you need to set the compression level “No compression” and “Split volumes by size”. To do this, indicate the largest file size in megabytes.
3. After the archive is created, you can see that it consists of a large number of parts of the same size. To extract an archive, it is enough to extract its first part (the archiver will highlight it).

After that, during installation, all files will be collected into one, and the error will no longer appear.

Compress large file

This is done again with the help of an archiver. The boot images are often around 4.7 GB in size. After compression, the volume is reduced to 3.5 GB. To reduce the size of a file, just right-click on it and select “Add to archive”. In the window that appears, you should specify the name of the archive, its format, as well as the compression method (it is better to set the maximum).

Find another file less than 4 GB

If a movie or other video file is recorded on the drive, you can try to find another one on the Internet, the weight of which is much less. In this case, the error will not be displayed.

As you can see, the error related to the large file size is actually quite easy to fix. All of the above methods allow you to write the desired file to the drive without problems.