pterjan's diary

  Strange large file limitation

I'm trying to move my home from one laptop to another one but I can't transfer one of the files.

It's a 20GB sparse file using actually 7GB (encrypted loopback). rsync -S stops after 16GB+64MB because of file too big, so does scp. I have no problems to rsync it to my backup server (2.6.16 kernel on x86_64, ext3 fs).

The source and destination are the same OS and softwares (as I did rsync /), it's a 2.6.17 kernel and the fs is ext3. ulimit -f says "unlimited".

I can create a 25GB sparse file (using qemu-img) without problem and write at the end of it (with dd bs=1M seek=20000), but cannot create a real file. dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1M count=20000 stops after 16GB+64MB with the same error...

So it looks like I can create a large file but not grow one (what rsync does).

I really have no clue, so any ideas are welcome :)

Update : I found something just after posting, the fs was created with very strange values like block size of 1024, ...