Mac Air a bit allergy

I've been using my Pismo as my primary laptop for 10 years. I've had a few other computers, but considering that it has superior battery life it tended to use it for everything.

So now that I have an Intel-based (the ISA is still terrible) Mac, I put on VirtualBox and tried to copy over the 40GiB image for Linux which we have in the lab that has some tools. Interesting, the Mac Air will be having none of that. The 40GiB image was copied from a Mac Pro to an external drive, and when I tried to copy it is when I noticed something odd. The the progress bar can be seen in Figure 1.

finder hangs

Figure 1. 4 minutes forever, I left it overnight and it was still 4 minutes.

So what is one to do? Well, I tried this a few times, and I got mixture of kernel panics and failures in different ways by either clicking the cancel "X" or killing the Finder.

finder error

Figure 2. Well, this error is better than the panic which previously occured.

So, being *unix savvy, I'm not particularly scared of the command line, but that didn't work out either.

copy error

Figure 3. Copy, copy, copy and stop.

As seen in Figure 3, the copy stopped at 32GiB. Killing it went well, as it would not cause a panic as with the Finder. Also, if one let it sit for a few hours, it would fail nicely, as seen in Figure 4.

copy error

Figure 4. At lease this failure has some sort of information.

Thoughts

A contiguous file larger than 32GiB is unlikely, but there seems to be no way around this. One would think that the Mac Air could handle this, but I understand the lowest-bidder mentality. Most people will not need files this large. It is terribly funny that the Pismo can copy a 40GiB file and the Mac Air cannot. So it goes.