SD card formatting problem

[Gary Roach <garyroach@verizon.net>]

I have a 32GB sd card that I have been trying to use as a transfer disk 
for a 19GB file. Each time, the file copies (cp command) to 4GB and 
stops. I tried to reformat to vfat with the same results. The df command 
shows the card has 32GB. I thought that vfat was only good to 4 GB but 
the card came formatted to vfat. Any suggestions? Can the card be 
formatted to ext3? Would that help? Is the card the problem? I am using 
a SanDisk USB card reader, model SDDR-113 which is supposed to handle 
32GB cards. Debian Squeeze and Wheezy systems gave same results.

Gary R.