1 Jan
2016
1 Jan
'16
12:36 p.m.
On Fri, 1 Jan 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote:
I've seen this on digicams with CF cards. 2GB is
the "official" limit to
FAT16 filesystems. However, XP and later can format 4GB cards to FAT16 as
well--and it seems to work very well with my older cameras, which do not
understand FAT32.
While, at the time, 2G seemed "infinite", even then, I was amused at the
2G limitation being due to the use of a SIGNED 32 bit number. The size
can be anywhere from -2147483648 to 2147483647.
By switching to an UNSIGNED 32, NT and the like made the limit 4G.
I had a few hard drives that were getting crowded, so I stomped on
DIRectory entries on some floppies and made some files with negative file
sizes. I confirmed empirically that copying a file with a negative size
to the drive did NOT increase free space.