Out of space?

Just a quickie. I’ve found an error message that may be a little confusing in Ubuntu. I may raise it as a bug, in fact.

I was trying to copy the Windows 7 DVD ISO file from my hard drive to a 4Gb USB stick. The stick was empty with roughly 3.7Gb of space free, and the ISO file is 2.4Gb in size. Normally, if you try to copy too large a file in Ubuntu, it tells you at the start to save you time. On this occasion, the copy began and trundled along until an error appeared telling me that the file was too big after around three minutes.

The problem is that the stick was formatted in FAT16 – which has a file size limit of 2Gb or thereabouts. A quick reformat to FAT32 and the copy worked fine.

A simple little thing, but one that did puzzle me for a few minutes until something clicked.