Solution to "Disk in the destination drive is full" error - when there is actually enough space

When copying files to your thumbdrive or portable hard disk, you see the following, wondering how much space did you actually use so far.

You've double checked to make sure that you do have free space. Yet this error shows. More often than not, there is really nothing wrong with your disk. This happens often on thumbdrives or portable hard disks because of the default filesystem that they use - FAT32. Intrinsically, FAT and FAT32 is unable to handle files of large sizes (max. limit of 4GB) and a misleading error message is shown. What you need to do is to convert it to a more modern file system such as NTFS. Should you really throw away FAT32 in favour of NTFS? There are other sites that document and discuss the two file systems such as this but if you're too lazy to read, the bottom line is, FAT32 is too outdated but required for backward compatibility on -really- old systems and to other systems most regular users wouldn't use

1. Run Command Prompt

   Click Start -> Run -> Type cmd in the box -> Press enter.

2. One of the steps in the actual conversion requires you to type in the volume label name of the target drive. So we'll need to find that out and note that down first.
   

   VOL [drive letter]:
   
   e.g. VOL F:
   where F is the name of the target drive
   
   You should see the following:
   
   In my case, the volume label name is "FREECOM-FYO". Note down on a piece of paper or notepad what yours says. You'll need to retype it exactly later.
   If it says "has no label" then you'll need to go through this guide first to set a label name.

3. Now it's time to run the actual conversion
   
   convert [drive letter]: /fs:ntfs
   
   e.g. convert F: /fs:ntfs
   where F is the name of the drive you want to convert
   

4. Enter the volume label that was noted down previously in step 2.
   

5. When you see the screen below, you can go grab yourself a cup of coffee and come back. It shouldn't take long and there shouldn't be any problems.

6. When you see the following screen after your coffee break, it's done. NTFS requires a certain amount of free space to do the conversion so if it doesn't work, just free up enough space on the disk to satisfy the reported space it needs and repeat from step 3 again.
   

Congratulations, you are now free to use the disk to store huge files and the misleading error message of having full disks is no more!