[TriLUG] linux/windoze Interoperability NOTE: 4 GB VFat filesize limit

[Jim Ray]

yeah, samba puked hard for me on ghost images of any size.  what kind of 
production rate do you get with the compression algorithm running?  i 
usually do default 2 GB on winders and haven't tried the smaller size on 
samba.

me thinks i'm gonna use jason's instructions on knoppix and dd next go 
around.  it would be cool to set up pxe boot to knoppix and not have to 
use a cd or ghost.

Jim Ray, President
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Tom Woods wrote:

> You may know this already, but you can (and I do) tell ghost to split 
> the image up into bite (not byte) sized files when you create it.  I 
> typically break all of my ghost images into 690MB files just in case, 
> for some unknown reason, I need to burn it off to CDs (or a DVD if the 
> target system supports DVD).  Having said that, I try to keep my 
> images as small as possible, so I've never made a 34GB image.
>
> ghost -split 690 -auto -z9
>
> That's what I use when I am going to create a ghost image.  The -auto 
> makes it automatically change the file extention without asking for 
> filename confirmation.  The -z9 forces the highest level of file 
> compression.  If you've not been using -z9, and you're making 34GB 
> images, you may be pleasantly surprised in the end-result.
>
> Hope this helps you.  If not, maybe someone else will benefit.
>
> Tom Woods
>
>
>
> Tomm Lorenzin wrote:
>
>> SUBJECT: errmsg "The file protocol process died unexpectedly"
>>
>> Hope this hermaphrodite/SaMBa-network issue saves someone some of the
>> head-scratching that I have been through for the past 24 hours.
>>
>> I have been having a problem xferring a 34GB "Norton Ghost" image from
>> my personal-networked FC3 RAIDed backup server to my USB2 portable
>> Maxtor 200GB HD. In several tries, the process always fails in the same
>> manner, i.e., the errmsg below shows up and a truncated 4GB file is all
>> that is present on the Maxtor despite bow-koo free space.
>>
>> BTW... the process also died in exactly the same manner when I tried to
>> write the file to the Maxtor over the network while the portable was
>> connected to the FC3 system. This more-or-less exonerated linux. The
>> errmsg was just linux's voicing of the problem 'cuz that's where we were
>> hooked up.  I'll bet (but I haven't tried yet) that I'll get a similar -
>> tho prolly more cryptic - errmsg from windoze xpee when I try to do the
>> same when directly connected to the wxpee machine.
>> Paraphrased form the wwweb:
>>
>> "VFAT has a file size limit of 4GB. That would explain the download or
>> file-transfer corrupting or quitting at 4GB.  This would not happen if
>> the maxtor was formatted as an ext3 partition."
>>
>> This explains why:
>>
>> 1. when Ghosting directly to the 200GB Maxtor from Windoze (as ususal) -
>> and NOT to a separate NTFS partition, Ghost - unbidden - breaks the
>> ghost image into separate 4GB blocks - NOT so that they can be written
>> to DVDs as previously surmised, and
>> 2, This is why xferring a large (>4GB) file to the Maxtor (VFat by
>> intersystem compatibility necessity) from FC3 fails when reaching 4GB
>> with the errmsg:
>>
>> "The file protocol process died unexpectedly"
>>
>> (NTFS - like ext3 - has no such 4GB filesize limit.  There may be one,
>> but I don't know where (in filesize) it is, and I don't wanna know. 7;^D
>>
>>
>>  
>>
>