Backing up VMWare machines to USB drive. ‘Cannot copy file. The Parameter Is Incorrect’

Posted on December 16, 2007 by Iain Magee

Well – it’s been another long silence on the blog! Don’t you hate it when people blog about not blogging!?!

Just solved one of those “duh – how did I miss that? problems!”. Our virtualisation “experiment” has been going well – now with 5 separate VM machines running on the new quad core server box. This splits up our server applications very nicely and gives us great control over allocated resources etc. We’ve even got our VoIP PBX running as a VM on the same box.

I’ll probably blog a bit more about this over the coming weeks, but this morning I thought I’d take the opportunity to grab a backup of all the VM images onto my USB hard drive. The theory is that if we have problems with our server hardware we can easily shift the image to a new box – restore the data – and away we go! 1 hour max.

Quickest way I thought will be to suspend the VM’s – copy all the VM & disk files across – and then start all the servers going again. All was going great until I got an error message :-

‘Cannot copy file. The Parameter Is Incorrect’

I tried an xcopy in dos with the same result. A VMWare issue I thought!? Perhaps I need to stop the machines rather than suspend? Or a permissions issue? Or some VMWare service still running and holding onto my file? Tried a different VM which worked fine. And then tried copying the non-working VM fileset to another location on the same hard drive … that worked too! So it was something to do with copying to the USB drive ….

… Finally the penny dropped that my new external HDD was formatted as FAT32 and hence had a maximium file size of 4Gb … my VM disk file was much bigger than that! A quick reformat and I got my backups squirted across onto the external disk with no trouble.

So nothing to do with VMWare at all which was why I could find nothing on this in google or on the VMWare forums – and also a reminder that you can find the answers to most things on the internet – provided you’re asking the right question!

Filed under: Computers, Software, Windows | Tagged: , , , ,

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6 Responses

  1. Will, on April 10th, 2008 at 5:21 pm Said:

    omg! I thought I was going crazy! I just got a new usb drive to do just what you explained above. Did a little properties check ans sure enough, fat32! haha reformatted to ntfs and everything copies just fine. Thank for this blog!!!

    Reply
  2. Dimple, on May 5th, 2008 at 6:18 pm Said:

    Thanks for the solution. It saved my day :)

    Reply
  3. Incudie, on June 2nd, 2008 at 4:14 pm Said:

    Thank you sir!

    That did the trick indeed =)

    Reply
  4. Guillermo Salgado, on August 19th, 2008 at 6:31 pm Said:

    Thanks Buddy! It was a very good tip!
    You save my life too!

    Reply
  5. SOC, on October 16th, 2008 at 8:04 am Said:

    Thanks to your blog, you can now find the answer to this question, on the internet :P

    A reminder that you can find the answer to most things on the internet, even if you are asking the wrong question…..so long as someone has asked the same wrong question before……and blogged it….ahem.

    Thanks XD

    Reply
  6. AdakaR, on January 14th, 2009 at 9:11 am Said:

    Heh, used almost half of yesterday not getting this right :P Thanks mate :)

    Reply

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