[NTLUG:Discuss] Humpty Dumpty Syndrome: split and cat on a 5 gig file

[Douglas Scott]

On Sunday 07 August 2005 11:08 am, Lenrek Xunil wrote:
> I'm doing some pro bono work at my brother's church.
>
> I needed to transfer a 5 gig backup file over a wireless network, so I
> split it into 10 files.  I used the Gentoo installation CD-ROM, which
> gives you a command line when you boot up.
>
[munch]
>
> #!/bin/bash
> cat xab >> xaa
> cat xac >> xaa
> etc...
>
> When it got to xai and xaj, it put out an error message for each
> saying something like "file limit exceeded".  Now I know it was not
> the hard drive, because it was a 40 gig hard drive that was mostly
> empty.  This second hard drive, by the way, was partitioned to 30 gigs
> using linux fdisk ("c" filesystem) and formatted as fat32 using
> Windows XP.
>
> So why can't I put the file back together again?  

Because the FAT32 file system doesn't support files larger than 4 Gig.

I like to dual boot my machines and use FAT32 drives as a common data area.  
But I can't download DVD images to them.  I ran into this trying to download 
the Fedora 4 image recently.  I can do it under XP writing to an NTFS file 
system.

So if you are using XP you need to format the drive as NTFS.

Doug