Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The Parameter Is Incorrect

When SysAdmins are troubleshooting the last thing they need are unhelpful error messages. I had one of those situations today. I was copying a 13GB file to an external drive on a Windows Server 2003 machine. On starting the copy I got the following error message:

Cannot Copy [filename] The Parameter is Incorrect.

Marvellous. Thankfully I came across this one before and remembered that it occurs when you try to copy a file >4GB onto a volume formatted with FAT32 i.e. the maximum file size on a FAT32 volume is approximately 4GB.

For curiosity's sake, this evening I fired up a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine on VMware Workstation, created an 8GB FAT32 volume and tried to copy a 5GB file to it.
Thankfully the error message in Windows Server 2008 is much more informative i.e. "The file [filename] is too large for the destination file system.":



As for the original problem, a quick convert f: /fs:ntfs solved the problem.

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