Two Gig Limit?!? XP-Home-SP2

[John H Meyers]

These are not file system or operating system limitations,
they are application limitations.

That is exactly what I said earlier:

Despite the larger theoretical limit on the size of a *file*,
you will have a hard time finding 32-bit *programs*
which won't fail on files as soon as they reach 2GB
[including non-recent MS-Outlook, and others as noted,
including even _some_ built-in OS components]

Thank you for confirming what I said, and best wishes.

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[John H Meyers]

As for formatting FAT32 over 32GB on Windows XP that is not news and it
is not a bug. It's been like that since Windows 2000 and it was
deliberate. If you think that formating a 300GB drive to FAT32 is a
good idea then there is nothing stopping you from using another
operating system or another disk formating utility and doing it, Windows
XP will be able to mount the drive and use it properly. In my opinion,
unless you have very specific needs, formatting such a larger drive to
FAT32 is not a very good idea.

I did not _recommend_ it, and I said that I followed the conventional advice
to reformat my own drive as NTFS; however, it remains a fact that Microsoft
has deliberately crippled "format" -- what if you want to format it
for a non-Microsoft use, or for sharing between MS and non-MS systems,
the same way as the OEM initially formats it,
perhaps even just to remove your own data before returning a unit?

Another way that this could have been handled would have been
to pop up a message giving out information and a recommendation,
then asking "are you sure you want to do this?"
but Microsoft always takes the position of an absolute dictator
and restrictor, rather than of an advisor and advocate,
to empower the user himself to make his own final decisions,
in his best overall interest.

It's just another example of Microsoft arrogance
about all other possibilities and useful things in the world,
if they do not have Microsoft's own brand name (and profit) attached;
it can even be seen as a continual attempt to sabotage anything non-Microsoft,
IMO an inferior corporate culture and psychology,
probably even injurious, in the final analysis, to itself.

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[John H Meyers]

Guess you better up date the programs
as it's not a fault of NTFS but the program.

Thank you for re-stating my earlier point again,
that despite an NTFS filesystem theoretically supporting
files of vastly greater size, a lot of software
(including even products of Microsoft and some OS components)
is itself still limited by the "2GB barrier,"
typically via the ubiquitous use of 32-bit signed integers in code.

And since "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link,"
this problem will continue being encountered for quite some while;
it is not solved merely by the potential of NTFS to contain large files,
as seemed to be the thrust of the initial replies to the OP.

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