Huge file is huge.

[The Man]

There's a torrent I want to download that contains an 8GB file. Unfortunately, this appears to be too large for XP, which I believe has a 4GB file size limit, to handle. Is there anything I can do besides installing another operating system or am I pretty much smurfed?

[Rantz]

I read at another place that Partition Magic can convert your file system to NTFS painlessly—apparently the FAT32 file system is at fault. Don't quote me on that though, I have no real knowledge on the subject of file systems. I have no idea whether it requires formatting the drive or not.

Edit: Actually, I kept reading a little bit about it and another person suggested this (again, I'm just the messenger, trust it at your own risk):

To convert the filesystem, open a command-box and enter "convert c: /FS:NTFS". Repeat that for all your harddisks (d:, e:...).

[The Man]

Hmm. I'll google that some more and learn more about it. Thanks for the heads-up.

[rubah]

OSX handled 6.6gb files alright! (not to mention the concatenating the 94 files that made it up because I had to download them off mediafire one at a time x.X)

I thought windows partitions were typically ntfs to start with?

[o_O]

XP will install on a FAT32 partition; Vista will only install on NTFS. But yeah, Rantzien is right, FAT32 imposes a 4GB filesize limit. You can quite easily convert a FAT32 partition to NTFS from the command line, but it's not trivial to convert back (i.e. you basically need a second temporary partition while you reformat). So obviously you want to be sure that you don't need to keep any FAT32 features not provided by NTFS before you convert. Unless you're running a very old version of Linux though, I can't think of any reason not to convert since NTFS is a superior FS.

Anyway, to convert, open a command prompt and run this command:

convert c: /fs:ntfs

It'll probably make you restart (definitely if the drive to convert is the drive XP is installed on or if the current directory of the prompt is on the conversion drive), so answer yes to the prompt if it does and then restart.