Large files not handled correctly

I'm running a WinXP VM on top of a Linux 2.6.18 kernel. I'm using Parallels 2.2RC, because that seems to be the only version of Parallels that is compatable with this kernel.

A CAD program I'm running on the VM generates very large files as part of its normal operation (~5Gb). To avoid having a huge virtual hard drive, (and to allow the host machine to access these files), I configure the program to generate these files in a shared folder on the host machine.

I am finding that the VM mis-reports the size of these files, whereas the host machine reports the size correctly. The file size reported by Windows appears to be the correct size minus 4Gb. i.e. a 5.3Gb file is reported as 1.3Gb. The CAD program runs correctly after generating this file, and is apparently able to access it normally. However, if I close it and re-open it, then it crashes, reporting a corrupted file. If I configure the program to use a remote file location on a fileserver, instead of the shared folder, then it appears to handle the file correctly, but with a large speed penalty.

So, in summary, the Windows VM runs into problems accessing large files, but only when they are in the shared folder. Is this an inherent limitation of Parallels, or have I got something mis-configured? Since the program takes about 10 hours to create this file, I don't want to keep going through this cycle.

Thanks for any help.

Clive Harris

 

I just run also into this limitation.
I'm using parallels to run some windows programmes for mpeg2 cutting and dvd authoring (mpeg2vcr and dvdlab). These mpeg files could easily be larger than 4GB.

It seems that the parallels shared folder mechanism supports the smbfs interface, which is limited to file sizes up to 4GB, as far as I remember. The newer cifs interface doesn't have this limitation.

I tried to connect from the WIN2000 guest system to the folders shared by samba on my host system. This works, because samba supports cifs. Unfortunally the data transfer rate is terribly slow.

It would be great if the limitation of the file sizes in shared folders could be removed.

Best regards, Klaus