What are the repercussions of not using a 8.3 filename?

[Guest]

What exactly are the repercussions of using a long file name? I heard is has something to do with winnt.exe not supporting it. When would one use winnt.exe? All my setups have gone fine when I have ignored this rule.

[jaclaz]

What exactly are the repercussions of using a long file name? I heard is has something to do with winnt.exe not supporting it. When would one use winnt.exe? All my setups have gone fine when I have ignored this rule.

I guess it is a "trail" of NT 4.00 CD's.

The 8.3 was originally a limit with the .iso standard used for the install cd.

The iso-level used needed 8.3 names and CAPITAL letters (no joliet, etc.).

It is also possible that the textmode part of the setup doesn't understand them, once in GUI mode there should be no problems.

Different source media may result in different behaviour, there is no "Upper Case" requirement for source on HD-like media, for example.

Another possible font of troubles may be CAB compressed files.

I guess that you can now (meaning XP/2003, I wouldn't be so sure about Win2K) deviate from this old standard, but obviously your mileage may vary, meaning that if you don't have a real *need* for it, you may be asking for troubles without a valid reason (if not the sake of experimenting )

For the record, when talking of .iso images, the Win2k loader only got as far as understanding iso-level 3 whilst XP and 2003 do understand iso-level 4.

jaclaz