Filesize > 2Gb

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Filesize > 2Gb
started by: Del

Posted by Del on April 16 2005,17:40

I've recently installed several different DSL's on my mini-itx machine (soon to be the family server), and have had assorted problems. Number two is that none of them see my swap partition. I can live with that, and try to fix it later.

I'm setting up this machine to back up some stuff before I clobber the current install on my duty machine. This includes a 2.5Gb tarball of my mp3's and a 3.5Gb tarball of my home directory. The problem is that after sending my big tarballs over to the DSL machine, they are only indicated as being 2.0Gb, even though I know they are much larger. The smaller ones are indicated as being the same.

Anyone have any ideas? I'd really like to use DSL on this cute damn small mobo machine, but I'm not willing to risk the integrity of my backups either.

Thanks,
Del

Posted by roberts on April 16 2005,17:47

There are so many ways to install DSL, you need to say which one.
When you say 2GB limit, during which part of the process?

I am guessing that you may be experiencing an issue with fdisk.
Is this a standard or enhanced hard drive install?

If standard use enhanced to get gnu fdisk otherwise try sfdisk instead.

Posted by Del on April 16 2005,18:04

Sorry, forgot about different installs. It's just an enhanced dsl-hdinstall. Everything installs just fine, other than not recognizing the swap partition (which I just figured out, it's written as swap, but not formatted as swap *smacks self in forehead*

The problem is after installation, when I attempt to back up my large files from another PC. It sits there and moves stuff over, but when I 'ls -lh' it tells me the two big files are 2.0Gb, even though they were 2.5 and 3.5 on the other machine. It's like it stops transferring at 2.0Gb? Or maybe they really are 2.5 and 3.5, but ls doesn't show bigger than 2.0? I'm stumped.

Thanks for the quick reply roberts, one of the many things I love about this distro is the support.

Posted by Del on April 16 2005,19:07

Got a little more info now. 'ls -l' says;
ls: /mnt/hda6/mp3.tar.gz: Value too large for defined data type
So maybe it's just a problem with ls, not with DSL or the kernel.

(this was after swapping drives between machines. This is the drive the archives were created on)

Posted by ptran on June 30 2005,17:36

I have the same problem so I must use Knoppix instead. However, the file was copied correctly. I copied a large tar file (>3GB) into one partition, did "ls -la" but could not see the file. "ls -la filename" will give me "value too large" error message. However, if I run "tar -xvf filename" to untar the file, then it worked. The file was untar successfully. No error while untaring, no error on the applications after untar. My guess was it was just the ls command that could not read a large file. The problem later is how to delete that tar file. Then "rm" does not see the file either. The only way to delete that file is "mkfs" the whole partition.
So maybe, it is not just the ls or rm commands.

Posted by ptran on June 30 2005,18:01

Oh, one more thing after I read roberts' post again.
If you create a swap partition (4GB), then "mkswap" will use only around 2GB. Right after that, I rebooted the system with Knoppix CD, did "mkswap", it used all the size of the partition.

I use DSL on CD, boot it up, partition harddisk (using fdisk) into hda1 (100M), hda2 (4GB), hda3(6GB) without any problem. hda2 is swap. Doing "mkswap" will use only 2G of hda2. Then cp a large file from CD drive into hda3, ls and rm have problem with "value too large".

Posted by ke4nt1 on June 30 2005,20:39

Most all of my problems went away with large files and
filesystems once I loaded up the gnu-utils.dsl .

I wonder if the busybox versions of ls , cp, and support
for the filesystems is limited by the use of busybox itself.

Try an enhanced install, or install gnu-utils ,
and/or try copying to another location/filesystem..

Using ext2 worked for me, but fat16/fat32 always
errored with the 2GB filesize limitation.
I don't know of a workaround using DOS/M$ filesystems.

73
ke4nt

Posted by cbagger01 on July 02 2005,06:13

The busybox "dd" command chokes at above 2GB, while the "real" GNU dd command works fine with large files.

So I think that your assumptions about Busybox in general are correct.

Posted by friedgold on July 02 2005,12:31

It is possible to access files greater than 2GB with busybox. Enabling support for this is a compile time option for busybox. I guess the version included in DSL simply hasn't been compiled with this option.