Fat32 harddrive...?

[Bobtheduck]

I recently got the full version (educational) of premiere (actually, the entire video suite), and I've been loving it. It's been great for very small projects. Something I began to notice recently, however, is it stops building long projects into DV-AVI (longer than about 20 minutes?) it says I'm out of space. So, I remember seeing something somewhere about Fat32 having a 4 gig limit. I was under the impression my "second" harddrive was a partition and not two actual physical hardrives. I take a quick glance at my computer, and see that C drive is NTFS, which is good because it can handle the larger files, but the main harddrive is only 60 gigs, with 40 of them full... Not good for movie projects, for certain. I need at least 13 gigs free for every tape of DV-AVI footage I'm gonna have. So... I look at my D drive... 160 gigs alltogether, 100 used and 60 free... Unfortunately, it is a FAT32 drive.

Is the file system something inherent in the physical drive, or can I change it? And if I can change it, by what means must I do this? Will this require a reformat? And why would my larger drive be formated in a way that I can only save files 4 gigs or smaller? This is a major snag... I have a lot of stuff on that harddrive, and I don't have 15 DVDs at my disposal at the moment.

[LorentzForce]

Start -> Run -> cmd -> convert.exe

'Tis a tool to convert FAT32 to NTFS.

[Bobtheduck]

Thank you so much... I was freaking out, thought I'd have to reformat my drive and waste 15 DVDs backing the thing up... This also explains problems I had with my All in wonder captures when trying to capture AVI...

[LorentzForce]

It's always a good idea to backup anyway.

[Mithrandir]

It's always a good idea to backup anyway.

Very, very true.

[Bobtheduck]

Well, since it was brought up, I can't quite back up my larger files, now... I officially have 2 files so far that are larger than 4.7 gigs and one larger than... the size of a dual layer, but I don't have a dual layer burner anyhow... I may look into a portable harddrive someday, but that won't be to backup as much as clear off because I will quickly use up that space on my HD...

[Mithrandir]

IIRC, there are utilities you can download which can break a large file into smaller files and put it back together again. Try googling for file splitter and see what comes up.