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Seriously, how long does it take a tech-savvy person such as myself to copy a 4.2GB file from one partition to another? 5 hours. But considering that I learned something, it was well worth it.

Here’s what I discovered won’t work:

• I can’t write directly to NTFS from Fedora, which is understandable as NTFS is by far the largest, yet undocumented, project ever reversed-engendered.
• FAT32 has a size limit of 4GB, so using my iPod wasn’t an option. The file was already compressed, otherwise I might have been able to get it down enough with bzip2.
• Just like FAT32, it is not possible to burn a file over 4GB to a DVD-RW.
• Uploading it to my server and redownloading it wasn’t possible as Apache will commit seppuku if you try to serve files larger then 2GB. It seems to be a 32bit limitation resulting in a 403 Forbidden error message.

Not wanting to go out of my way and install Samba or a FTP server I figured I’ll split the files into 1GB chucks and recombine them with the Windows Command Line.

$ split -b 1024m bigfile.img

I copied the pieces to Windows using one of the above methods, then started MSDOS cmd.exe and combined them.

> copy /b xaa + xab + xac + xad + xae bigfile.img

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 12:55 am and is filed under Linux, Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.