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

[Tom Woods]

Jim,

To be honest, I'm usually not patient enough to run ghost over the 
network if I can avoid it.  Generally I make a FAT32 partition and ghost 
to that directly and then burn/copy/move the image as necessary.  When I 
have to image over the network, it's at the office where we're running 
100% Windows based file servers, so I haven't tried ghosting to a samba 
box...  Thanks, now I have another project to do.  :)  I'll probably set 
up a samba server at home, one of these days, and see if I can ghost to it.

I've used dd before, but it's been quite a while, and it was painfully 
slow compared to ghost.  I would think that it's improved significantly 
in the past two or three years, since I used it last.  I also was a rank 
Linux beginner at that time, so I may have not been set up real well.  
At that point in time I hadn't even heard of Knoppix (did they even 
exist back then?) so I was kind of on my own to get it working.

Take care,

Tom Woods

Jim Ray wrote:

> 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
> Neuse River Network, Inc.
>
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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
>>>
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>