I cant seem to copy a 8 gig rar file on my phone even though it says I have 27 gig free. i can copy smaller 1 gig files fine without a problem.

when i try the larger file i receive a message that the device is full. I have tried the age old switch it on and off again.

next I am going to unrar the file and try copying them across in the smaller chunks. im going to keep increasing the file size and see if there is a limit.

really annoying as this has been my first roadblock with the device in the month i have had it. with all the horror stories i was worried but mine has so far worked like a dream

I don't have the device yet so I can't tell, but if the place you want to copy the files to is a FAT filesystem it has a natural filesize limit of 4 Gigabyte/file. This is not N900 specific.

EDIT: Can somebody confirm it's a FAT filesystem?

I think that due to the format of the N900's mass storage.

There is a 4gb limit I believe.

You may need to format into NTFS if you want to copy files over that limit but I don't know if there'll be any problems if you do.

Yes, it's a limitation with the FAT32 filesystem which is used for both the memory card and the MyDocs directory.

The configuration is pretty much hard-coded for FAT32 at the moment, so there's quite a few changes that you need to make to get a reformatted (ext3 or NTFS) partition to automount. For NTFS you'd also need to install the extra kernel modules (they're available in extras-devel) as they're not included in the standard supplied kernel.

Thanks for that, I was unsure.

@Reffyyyy: I wouldn't recommend formatting to NTFS because this will make accessing the filesystem on the N900 way harder. If you really want to use another filesystem I would recommend ext3 because there are drivers for it for Windows -> http://www.fs-driver.org/ (don't know if this works with Windows 7, thought).

rar files can be split by winrar and they still function like one file (double click the first rar in sequence and it will open to show all files, and extraction is seamless too)

@Pete.fu: I wasn't planning on it, I was just curious. Thanks for the tip anyway.

It was a season of lost my friend had put into one file. i just unrar'd it and copied the files across keeping below the 4gig limit. all has worked fine.

i cant believe i have all my photos, music and in a short while, 3 seasons of lost on my phone. Admittedly having lost is just a means of getting it from work to home. Now i think im going to find all the anime i have not bothered to watch and have it on my phone for the long train journey. this phone grows on me every day