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View Full Version : 4 gb limit on MS-DOS format



Merlin005
Nov 22, 2004, 09:25 PM
When trying to copy a large file to an MS -DOS formatted drive there seems to be a 4 GB limit to the allowable file size. Is there a way of overcoming this limit. or does anyone have a work around, other than breaking up the file into smaller chunks. Thanks

Merlin


locovaca
Nov 22, 2004, 09:34 PM
When trying to copy a large file to an MS -DOS formatted drive there seems to be a 4 GB limit to the allowable file size. Is there a way of overcoming this limit. or does anyone have a work around, other than breaking up the file into smaller chunks. Thanks

Merlin

The 4GB is a limit of FAT-32, and is not present in NTFS. Unfortunately, I do not believe you can mount and write NTFS on OS X. So, the only option I can think of is reformatting the disk to NTFS, mounting it on a Windows machine, and then doing things over a network.
BornAgainMac
Nov 22, 2004, 10:03 PM
Stuffit Deluxe 9 has a feature to split an archive across multiple segment sizes of your choice. I have been very happy with this program. I was surprised FAT32 allows up to 4GB files. I would have thought it would be limited to 2GB files. I have forced all my PCs to use the Mac filesystem by installing a Addon program that allows Windows to read Mac filesystems.

Stuffit Deluxe 9 Link:
http://www.stuffit.com/win/deluxe/index.html
locovaca
Nov 23, 2004, 07:15 AM
Stuffit Deluxe 9 has a feature to split an archive across multiple segment sizes of your choice. I have been very happy with this program. I was surprised FAT32 allows up to 4GB files. I would have thought it would be limited to 2GB files. I have forced all my PCs to use the Mac filesystem by installing a Addon program that allows Windows to read Mac filesystems.

Stuffit Deluxe 9 Link:
http://www.stuffit.com/win/deluxe/index.html

FAT32, as the name would indicate, uses (unsigned) 32 bit data structures to point to data. 2^32 ~= 4 GB.