Splitting a large file????

[casey.o]

Several recent posts on here have mentioned that files over 4G cant be
put onto a Fat32 formatted drive. I've never had this problem because
I've never dealt with any files that big. But this got me thinking
about something. Lets say I did have a file over 4G on a NTFS drive. I
want to copy it to a Fat32 Flash stick, to transfer it to another
computer, which also has a NTFS drive. Obviously this wont work!

Back in the Dos days, there were programs that would split a large file
into parts, and that file could be reassembled later. Back then, it was
used to make it easier to upload and download large files, on dialup.

Anyhow, I'm wondering if such a program exists for Windows, and whether
that could be used to put that (example:- 5G file) on a flash drive, by
splitting it into two 2.5G (or more) parts?

I dont see where I'll ever have to deal with such a huge file, but it
made me remember those old file splitting programs.... Anyhow, Just a
thought!

 

[Paul]

Several recent posts on here have mentioned that files over 4G cant be
put onto a Fat32 formatted drive. I've never had this problem because
I've never dealt with any files that big. But this got me thinking
about something. Lets say I did have a file over 4G on a NTFS drive. I
want to copy it to a Fat32 Flash stick, to transfer it to another
computer, which also has a NTFS drive. Obviously this wont work!

Back in the Dos days, there were programs that would split a large file
into parts, and that file could be reassembled later. Back then, it was
used to make it easier to upload and download large files, on dialup.

Anyhow, I'm wondering if such a program exists for Windows, and whether
that could be used to put that (example:- 5G file) on a flash drive, by
splitting it into two 2.5G (or more) parts?

I dont see where I'll ever have to deal with such a huge file, but it
made me remember those old file splitting programs.... Anyhow, Just a
thought!

7ZIP has a "split to volumes, bytes" setting.

Say you have a large file, like 10GB. Maybe winxp.vhd.

Install 7ZIP, right-click the 10GB file, select
"Add to Archive" to make a new archive. The
archive might be

winxp.vhd.7z or winxp.vhd.zip

and the 7z or zip is a container to hold the single file
in this example.

In the archive window, set the compression to "Store". That
setting, doesn't do any compression, so is fast in terms
of operation time. It will copy the file, verbatim, and
store it in the new container format.

Now, save the archive, and you'll get some sort of
series of files like

winxp.vhd.zip.1
winxp.vhd.zip.2

or something similar. Now your file is stored as
a series of files. You could even have the winxp.vhd
file hosted on an NTFS partition, and the "Add to Archive"
could be saving them off to a FAT32 partition.

That's probably not the best example, but it happens
to be one I have available on my machine right now.
I'm using 9.30 at the moment.

http://www.7-zip.org/

Paul

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Several recent posts on here have mentioned that files over 4G cant be
put onto a Fat32 formatted drive. I've never had this problem because
I've never dealt with any files that big. But this got me thinking
about something. Lets say I did have a file over 4G on a NTFS drive. I
want to copy it to a Fat32 Flash stick, to transfer it to another
computer, which also has a NTFS drive. Obviously this wont work!

Back in the Dos days, there were programs that would split a large file
into parts, and that file could be reassembled later. Back then, it was
used to make it easier to upload and download large files, on dialup.

Anyhow, I'm wondering if such a program exists for Windows, and whether
that could be used to put that (example:- 5G file) on a flash drive, by
splitting it into two 2.5G (or more) parts?

There are several, such as almost every zip program.

 

[micky]

Several recent posts on here have mentioned that files over 4G cant be
put onto a Fat32 formatted drive. I've never had this problem because
I've never dealt with any files that big. But this got me thinking
about something. Lets say I did have a file over 4G on a NTFS drive. I
want to copy it to a Fat32 Flash stick, to transfer it to another
computer, which also has a NTFS drive. Obviously this wont work!

Back in the Dos days, there were programs that would split a large file
into parts, and that file could be reassembled later. Back then, it was
used to make it easier to upload and download large files, on dialup.

Anyhow, I'm wondering if such a program exists for Windows, and whether
that could be used to put that (example:- 5G file) on a flash drive, by
splitting it into two 2.5G (or more) parts?

I dont see where I'll ever have to deal with such a huge file, but it
made me remember those old file splitting programs.... Anyhow, Just a
thought!

There are a lot of file splitter programs. Just google file splitter.

I needed one for a reason I'll explain. I tried several and they all
worked, but only the last was the best.

They sell things that plug into the cigarette lighter, and are plugged
into by a flash drive, and they play whatever sound file is on the flash
drive Autozone sells them for 17 dollars, which I thought was cheap
enough, but on the web they have identical looking things for 3 or 4
dollars.

Most people play music, and if you turn the car off in the middle of a
song, it starts again at the start of that song the next time, and if
you drive until the song finishes, it goes onto the next song. You
can't even tell when it changes files. There's no click or anything.

But I wanted to record Diane Rehm or the old-time radio show between 7
and 11 on WAMU. The files were a hour or 4 hours long, and if I
turned the car off after say 45 minutes, when I turned the car back on
it started again at the beginning. So I'd play the same half hour
over and over. By splitting the file into 2 or 3 minute pieces, it
only replayed at most one piece, and on average, 1/2 piece.

The last program I tried was specifically for MP3 files and
automatically ended every file name with .mp3. Like most other
programs, the first part of the name was a combination of date and time
and any alphanumeric string I chose. Plus they all came with a method
to put the files back in one file again, which I didn't need.

Most have several other options I haven't mentioned, like splitting into
a user-determined number of pieces, or a pre-set for flopppy disk size.

I'll give you the program names if you want, but we have different
needs.