Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (6210 mails)

[Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/20/05, Carl Hartung <suselinux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thursday 20 October 2005 10:00, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> > ... FAT32 has a 2 GB limit, so definately don't use a FAT32
> > volume as a staging area.
>
> Please qualify this statement, Greg. I don't think its entirely accurate. I
> hate to "nit-pick" but this is the kind of misinformation that one person
> reads, accepts as gospel,  passes it along to family and friends who, in
> turn, pass it along to their family and friends until it circles the globe a
> couple of times and ends up back here as a question. And the first one to
> pick it up and pass it along can have his life ruined, too:
>
Carl,

I don't know what you mean?

As far as I know the FAT 32 filesystem has a 2 GB max file size. 
Therefore it would be a very bad place to stage tar files larger than
2 GB.

If you know otherwise I would be very interested.  I really _need_ a
reliable and readily available solution for moving large files from
Linux to Windows.  Right now I always use split to break the files
into 2 GB or smaller pieces and write them to FAT32.  Then I have the
choice of using specialized software that can work with the split
images (I'm talking about Computer Forensic software and much of it
does support split files.)

Or I can re-assemble the pieces via Windows by writing to a NTFS partition.

FYI: I am not saying anything about FAT32's max filesystem size.  I
don't know what it is, but with Linux I have formatted single
partitions up to 400GB.  The standard Windows OS tools refuse to
create that large of a FAT32 partition.  Third party tools like
partition magic will also format large partitions as FAT32.

Greg
--
Greg Freemyer
The Norcross Group
Forensics for the 21st Century