How many gig HD can I...

[Thomas]

This is normal behavior with any software, no matterh which OS version you use. All above 2GB becomes negative and all above 4GB becomes very small.

There is only very few software which can deal with amounts above 2GB. Mainly the OS3.9 Workbench, nothing more that I knew of.

But why should anyone need a boot partition of more than 500MB ? AmigaOS needs about 30MB with everything one can think of installed.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

I didn't say that partitions larger than 2GB are not possible. With FastFileSystem V44 partitions up to 8GB are possible IIRC and with SFS or PFS3 any size of partition is possible (up to 2TB or so).

But any program that calculates the space on a partition in bytes and does not specially take care will struggle above 2GB and fail above 4GB. Because traditional programming languages use 32bit signed integers and 2GB is more than fits into 31 bits (1 bit for sign) and 4GB is more than fits into 32 bits.

Only very modern programs take care of such large numbers.

The circumvention is simple: either don't check the free space on the destination disk or fill the disk until less than 2GB is left. Or don't create partitions larger than 2GB at all.

Bye,
Thomas