Just about ready to give up on Disk Utilty, I could not figure out why my 4.41 gb music folder would stop being created; I got a message "file size too big". Strange considering I have 72 gb to play with. Then it hit me that my FAT32 formatted external drive has that annoying 4 gb file size limitation. I tested this theory and sure enough, a 1gb file was made into a .dmg no problem.

If I want to create images in the future larger than 4gb, should I partition a drive with NTFS? Seeing as how I would like to create an image of my current HD, so I can safely swap to a bigger HD, this seems like a reasonable option. Am I correct or is there an alternative way?

Also, would you say that Disk Utility is a safe way to create an image of my Macbook hard drive for a future HD upgrade? Would you suggest a 3rd party app (like Carbon Copy ot SUper Duper) instead?

And finally, has anyone tried 500 GB notebook drives in their Macbooks yet?

Thank you .

FAT32 has the 4 GB file size limit built into the standard.

If you go with NTFS, you may be able to read, but will not be able to write files from OSX, unless you get some additional software
Mac NTFS-3G (open source) NTFS-3G for Mac OS X

If you go with Mac OS Extended (HFS+) OSX will be good, but Windows won't read or write without additional software
MacDrive (commercial) Mediafour | MacDrive