I bought a USB hard disk recently that I wanted to use to backup some VMware Workstation and some Hyper-V virtual machines for a project I’m working on.

I’m running VMware Workstation on my host and a Hyper-V server on a VM inside my VMware Workstation. There will be another post on how to do this shortly, but for now I wanted to share an interesting little problem I ran into.

I mounted my USB hard drive inside my VMware Workstation VM that was running Hyper-V and I tried to export one of my Hyper-V VM’s direct to my USB drive. I got error saying ‘Not enough space at the destination for the source file’ I had difficulty understanding why I was getting this error. My VM file was around 7.7GB and the free space on my hard disk was 495GB. This didn’t make much sense to me.

A quick Google search and it became clear that my problem was to do the file system on my USB hard disk. FAT32 file system can only cope with files of 4GB or less in size. My USB drive was a FAT32 file system. I formatted the drive to make it NTFS(Caution: this will wipe all data off the drive!), fortunately for me there was no data on the drive, so I had no data to lose on the drive  and tried my Hyper-V Export again and the export worked perfectly.

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