[lug] Max file size

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2001 at 01:53:02PM -0500, John Karns wrote:
>I would like to use dd to create a compressed image file of a vfat
>partition which exceeds 2GB in size, and I bump into the limit which

Well, first of all you can use compression to bring the size down:

   dd if=/dev/hdaN | bzip2 >hdaN.dd.bz2

You can also use "split" to have it write to multiple 2000MB files:

   dd if=/dev/hdaN | bzip2 | split --bytes 2000m - hdaN.dd.bz2.

KRUD 7.2 seems to be able to write >2GB files using dd these days.

Another thing that can help is to mount the DOS partition and then do "dd
if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/dosdrive/zero; rm /mnt/dosdrive/zero".  This fills up
the partition with zeros, so that it compresses better.

On my laptop, running KRUD 7.2, it seems to work fine with dd:

   [2] guin:jafo# dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile
   <Control-C after a while>
   [2] guin:jafo# ls -l bigfile
   -rw-r--r--    1 root     root         2.9G Dec 18 18:01 bigfile

Sean
-- 
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Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
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