It would interest me as to why the file size is stored in a signed 32-bit integer and not an unsigned int 32- wouldn't this provide for larger files then ? (4GB - 1)

Regards,

Nandini Hengen

----- Original Message -----

From: Mark Day

To: Entwicklung

Cc: hfs-user@lists.mars.org

Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 10:35 PM

Subject: Re: [hfs-user] HFS Maximum Image Size

The maximum file size on HFS volumes is 2GB-1 (the maximum value in a signed 32-bit integer). See struct HFSCatalogFile.

The maximum volume size is theoretically just under 256TB (actually, 65535 allocation blocks * (4G-512) bytes per allocation block). The allocation block size is an unsigned 32-bit integer, but must be a multiple of 512. I don't know of any implementation that supports HFS volumes 2TB or larger; some versions have much smaller limits (eg., 2GB or 4GB). Many implementations use 32-bit integers (signed or unsigned) for offsets into the volume, or as block numbers (assuming 512 bytes per block).

-Mark

On Sunday, April 21, 2002, at 07:44 AM, Entwicklung wrote:

The maximum size of an HFS-volume seems to be 65535*65535 = 3.99 GB. (since the respective fields in the MDB are UInt16's). Does this mean that to store a file of size 4.7GB I would have to necessarily go in for HFS+ or is this possible with HFS somehow ?