I thought I would write a quick blog on a problem I see frequently: You try to copy a large file, such as the iso image of SQL Server, to a USB flash drive, and get the error message “There is not enough free space on the drive”. But you know you have plenty of free space. What is going on?
The answer is simple: your flash drive is formatted with the FAT32 file system. This type of file system has a built-in limitation where the size of each individual file may not exceed 4GB.
The solution is simple: you need to replace the FAT32 file system on the drive with the NTFS file system, which does not have the 4GB file size limitation. Simply format the USB flash drive with the NTFS file system. Alternately, you can use a program like WinZip to split the large file into multiple smaller files.