Windows 2000 2 GB file limit

[Kenneth Brody]

"Jay R. Ashworth" wrote:
[...]
> > Win9x systems (95, 98, and Me) have 2GB filesize limits.  NT-based systems
> > (NT, XP, 2000, and 2003) do not have these limits.
> 
> This isn't strictly correct.
> 
> The limit is in the design of the filesystem, not in the underlying OS:
> *any* OS will limit you to a 2GB filesize *on a FAT32 filesystem*.
> 
> Even NT.

Yes and no.  Yes, a filesystem that doesn't allow >2GB files obviously
won't allow it regardless of the O/S.  No, in the sense that Win9X can't
access >4GB files regardless of the filesystem.  For example, I created
a huge file on a WinXP box with NTFS, and from a Win98 box on the network,
I attempted to copy that file, also to NTFS.  Although the copy kept on
running, the file never got bigger than 4,295,007,744 bytes, which is
actually 4GB+40,448 for some reason.  Now, the Win98 box sees the file as
on 40,448 bytes in size, and copy will only copy that many bytes.  (And
I'm not sure how you would access the file beyond the 2GB boundary, as
the Win9x API doesn't have any way to specify a file offset >2GB.)

> There's a 1 or 2 GB limit on the associated AVI video files, to pick up
> a tangent of Mark's other thread, but that is unrelated to the
> filesystem the file lives on.


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