Multibooting: I want a common data partition for Windows XP and Linux.
Posts: 8
My end goal is simply to have a common "My Computer" disk or partition that can be read and written to by My many Linuxes and by Win XP. Should I make it FAT32 ? Both can access this filesystem but I have read that it fragments badly (mostly Linux people shooting it down). It will be a 38GB partition if I only make one.
Should I make it ext2 and use one of those windows drivers? I will not be able to take a read and write performance hit though because I will be editing videos with both Adobe software on the windows side and (I don't know what the good video editing software in Linux is yet).
Should I make it NTFS and install that Linux software NTFS-3G (http://lunapark6.com/?p=1710) that allows Linux to read and write to NTFS partitions? Again, I am wondering if there will be a read and write performance hit that will make for stuttering audio/video playback and bad video editing.
On this common partition I will have MP3 and Oggs for listening, Office and OpenOffice documents, Jpegs and I will be editing videos from my mini DV camcorder.
I suppose that I could make two or even three partitions but I hate to have duplicate files.
I am pretty confused on how to go about this...
I have no problems with
Posts: 85
I have no problems with using a Windows EXT2 driver to read/write my EXT2/3 partitions.
FAT32 Is The Only Common Denominator
Posts: 5513
If you want to have an area for sharing stuff between Windows (of various kinds) and Linux (of various kinds) the only common denominator is FAT32. Don't blame Linux, for years the Linux (and BSD) developers have "tried to play nice" with Windows. They CAN read and write to FAT32. The reason you cannot use FAT32 for all of your Linux needs is because the file structure does not support the permissions that exist in Linux (or BSD).
Unfortunately, if you use FAT32 I don't think you can go above an 8GB partition (I could be wrong on that maximum). And yes, it does fragment.
Microsoft, on the other hand, refuses to acknowledge any of the alternate file systems that exist. If you boot up a drive with Windows, that also has some other partition with a different file system, Windows will show it as "unknown" (clippy: do you want me to format that for you?)
With NTFS-3g support coming to Mepis soon, you WILL be able to read and write to NTFS partitions. But I would recommend that you reevaluate your needs for a common area. Namely, exactly how much space do you think you need? If you have an additional computer that you can turn into a server, you would also have the ability to run Linux on it and share a directory via SAMBA. Would that work for you?
Jon
Microsoft Windows Vista now on sale!
Buy now, Really Pay Later
fat32 is ok to 200Gb
Posts: 959
I have made and worked with huge fat32 partitions on a system I set up with a 250Gb HDD, 32gb ntfs for XP and 12Gb ext3 for Mepis, 1Gb for swap and the rest as fat32 for data.
Both XP and Mepis could access the full range of the fat32 partition without faults, but mepis does a better job of repairing fat32 faults than does xp, so m$ dont even really fully support their own file systems, let alone a competitors. That's what I call dumb and daft.
Mike P
--------------------
Life may not be the party we thought, but while we're here, we may as well dance.
Break M$'s shackles from your feet and free yourself with Mepis
I went with a large FAT32.
Posts: 8
I went with a large FAT32. So far, so good.
fat32 or ntfs is fine if you use the mepis 6.5
Posts: 959
Emelberts post indicates that Mepis 6.5 will be coming out with the ntfs-3g driver, so you can have write access to ntfs formatted filesystems.
If you need to run windows, why not give Linux first place and make windows a guest using vmware? I personally don't think a system that phones home and does not trust you should ever be awarded first place because it just can't be trusted.
http://www.mepis.org/node/12779
Mike P
--------------------
Life may not be the party we thought, but while we're here, we may as well dance.
Break M$'s shackles from your feet and free yourself with Mepis