2 gig size limit workaround?

blairisticblairistic
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Sorry if this has been covered before - I did a quick search and couldn't find anything. Mac OS apparently can't read files bigger than 2 gigabytes over a network - anything larger than this will read as 2 gigs, or 1.99 gigs, and won't transfer correctly. This seems to be true of OS X and OS 9, between any Mac - however, Mac OS X can read files larger than 2 gigs on an NT system. Is there a workaround for this?



Just to be clear, I am talking about individual files - folders can be read / transferred correctly no matter what their size. But that doesn't really help me.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    jregojrego Posts: 56member
    Can't say that I've ever heard of that problem... I've transfered movie files in excess of 3GB before (X to X, haven't tried it in the older OSes) without any trouble. What kind of machines are you working with? The two I tried did have new world ROMs... They were also running newer than Mac OS 10.1 (LCD iMac and iMac DV+).



    Of course, if there's something "special" about your machines, there's always the sneakernet workaround. Get a really big Firewire drive and it'll probably go faster just to carry it, unless you're on a gigabit LAN or better.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    blairisticblairistic Posts: 15member
    I have a single machine (G4 single proc at 500 mHz) on OS 10.1.5, to this I would like to transfer (or at least see) big files on several other macs, most of them are G4s, all of them are at some flavor of OS 9. I suspect that if I could upgrade them to X this problem would vanish.......but I can't. The OS 9 machines can't see big files between themselves, either.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    thuh freakthuh freak Posts: 2,664member
    i think i remember this being a problem with HFS (the mac's old file system). Most mac drives (from the past few years) have been HFS+, which I thnk doesn't have this problem. CHeck the harddrive, and see if it is HFS, or HFS+. Then again, I could be totally off-base; i do remember hearing about this issue a while back tho. As far as fixing it, i'm not really sure. There might be a technote at apple.com/support.
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