I am trying to use a large hard drive for downloading and such, but am running into an issue with large files. I would like to share this drive over a linux machine with my network, but also have access to it on both linux and windows machines (it's in a firewire enclosure). I had decided to go with fat32 since it is compatible with both operating systems, but for some larger dvd rips I found that fat32 is unable to support files larger than 4gb. The main fs choices I saw were some linux fs (reiser/ext) but that stops me from hooking it up directly to a windows machine, or ntfs - but then I'd have the same problem with linux. Is there some way to get around this roadblock with fat32, and/or is there another common filesystem I'm missing?

Your windows machines should be able to get the files from the Linux partitions if you're running Samba. That is, unless Samba has a size limit. You might investigate that posibility.

Yes, through samba I can can access any kind of fs the server supports... But I want to physicaly connect the drive to systems running both OSes. Any obscure filesystems out there that have read/write support in both environments?

FAT32 is the middleground for both read and write access between Windows and Linux, but you do have the large file problem you mentioned. Linux can easily read NTFS, but writing it is still considered experimental AFAIK. Do this at your own risk.

Nor can I imagine letting Windows write to any non-Microsoft filesystem. I'm sure someone has written a utility to do just that, but I'd consider allowing that operation akin to allowing someone to run your favorite pet through a blender.

If you give up on trying to find something that is cleanly read/write by both OS'es (short of FAT32), and decide you'll always write it via Linux and then share it to Windows via Samba over a network, then your options are open. JFS or XFS are good filesystem choices for use with large files. I'm not aware of Samba limitations on sharing large files like someone else mentioned as a possibility, but that was a great suggestion to check this out before committing yourself. I'd like to know the answer for sure myself.

I would say that a local, non-samba filesystem setup would be to use ext2. Linux can of course handle it just fine, and you'd be surprised how well the open source 3rd party support is for Windows when it comes to reading ext2. Last I checked there is even progress being made on reading reiserfs. Some tools that may interest people considering ext2:

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm
http://www.fs-driver.org/

WOH hold the phone! That fs-driver.org has read/write support (ext2) in windows and looks pretty professional. I will give that a shot and report on my findings. The only thing is, I have the need to unplug this drive and take it to a friend's house (undoubtedtly running an NT variant of windows) and share files. Depending on the success of this read/write driver for windows... I may be in the clear.

Ok here's a crazy idea -- what about a novell/netware filesystem? For such a big system there has to be read/write support on both OSes.

I'm using Novell/SuSE 9.2 Pro. It has network support for Novell but it does not have local file system support for Novell native file systems.

OK - problem solved. I used ext2 for the drive, shared it over samba, and installed the http://www.fs-driver.org/ ext2 driver.

I found that the driver works, and well. Considering it fits on a floppy disk, I think it will be a non-issue for installing the driver on friend's computers. After building the filesystem, change it to ntfs (hex option 7) in fdisk and then windows will hotplug it perfectly!

Now I have large file support on linux, and a very good read/write driver for when I want to plug into a windows machine. Thanks for the link!