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I formatted a 16 GB USB Stick today so I could boot from it and that works great. The problem I have is it won't let me copy a 7GB Ghost image over to USB, it says there isn't enough space. When I look Windows shows there is 14GB available. Can anyone give me some insight into this issue?

quack quixote
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Nathan
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2 Answers2

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You probably have formatted the USB stick to FAT32 filesystem which does not support filesizes in excess of 4GB. Try reformatting it as NTFS.

Sathyajith Bhat
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  • Ah. I sure did. I am not sure if NTFS will work but I will give it a shot. – Nathan Jun 01 '10 at 20:36
  • So apparently NTFS is not a bootable format. Do you know of any ways around this issue? – Nathan Jun 01 '10 at 21:34
  • @Nathan NTFS is a bootable format. The image probably doeesn't have the correct boot records. Unfortunately I haven't tried what you're trying to do, perhaps these links would help? : http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/30106-35-making-ghost-recovery-disk-bootable http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/104293-how-make-external-usb-hard-drive-bootable-using-ghost-v10.html

    You probably want to create 2 partitions, 1 small (FAT/32)to carry the boot records, and the other larger to store the ghost image.

     – Sathyajith Bhat Jun 01 '10 at 22:05
  • Basically what I am trying to do is make a bootable USB stick which contains the Norton Ghost boot software and then move the image onto the same USB stick so I can boot and image from the same device. Does this help at all? – Nathan Jun 02 '10 at 00:42
  • @Nathan yes, that's what you should try to do. If all goes well, it should work swell – Sathyajith Bhat Jun 02 '10 at 00:53
  • I formatted the usb stick to NTFS using DISKPART and when it goes to boot it says it can't find BOOTMGR? Do you know how to fix this? I looked through what you posted and I can't get any of it to work. – Nathan Jun 02 '10 at 16:03
  • @Nathan Sorry I'm not sure how to proceed further. Let me try to search for something else. – Sathyajith Bhat Jun 03 '10 at 13:13
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While using NTFS instead of FAT32 may work, you can also get it to work with FAT32. You have to split the large image file (install.wim) into pieces of 4 GB. You can do it with the following command (where D: contains your mounted .ISO file and E: is your USB stick):

DISM /Split-Image /ImageFile:D:\sources\install.wim /SWMFile:E:\sources\install.swm /FileSize:4096

You can read more about the creation of a Windows boot stick in my answer here.

stackprotector
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