On 2009-03-31, Dave Angel <da...@ieee.org> wrote: >>> Unfortunately, although the program still ran under NT (which >>> includes Win 2000, XP, ...), the security system insists on >>> zeroing all the intervening sectors, which takes much time, >>> obviously.
>> Why would it even _allocate_ intevening sectors? That's pretty >> brain-dead. > The FAT file system does not support sparse files. > > They were added in NTFS, in the Windows 2000 timeframe, to my > recollection. NTFS was added in NT 3.1 (which predates Win2K by 7-8 years). However, I don't remember anybody using it much until a year or two later around NT 3.5 Which makes one wonder if perhaps the change in behavior under NT/2K/XP wasn't the security system zeroing out intervening sectors but rather the filesystem not allocating them at all and returning 0's when one read a "hole" in the resulting sparse file. > Don't try to install NTFS on a floppy. Not to worry, the thought hadn't occurred to me. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! I've read SEVEN at MILLION books!! visi.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list