I am revisiting the possibility of making a single partition for data that both windows and Linux can read and write to.

1. I have had two separate partitions and that has gotten old really quickly as I am always wanting to access something that is in the wrong partition (NTFS, ext3).

2. Some have suggested to make a big FAT32 which Linux and obviously windows can use. Others have said that FAT32 is a bad filesystem and not a good place to put data.

3. The other extreme and what I am looking into now is to make a big ext2 or ext3 partition and run the windows driver that allows it to read and write to ext2 and ext3 paritions. I just want your take on that driver and even how I can get around this problem of common data storage between win and Linux.

Thanks,

B.

There is one for ext2, but does not read journaling portion ext3 with that. So some data may not be seen. ext2ifs http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm

Now there should be no reason why you can't use the ntfs-3g under the Fuse interface. Their claim is it is 100 percent safe to read and write to ntfs. If there is ever a problem they want to know.

Can't see why fat would be a problem at all. You will lose some attributes of a file when they are placed on fat32. But if all the data is things like docs, music, videos then I see no problems there. Granted Windows can't create on larger than 32gig it can read and write to ones larger. Just have to use linux to create it. http://www.allensmith.net/Storage/HDDlimit/FAT32.htm

Brian

I have used a windows driver for ext2/3 (http://www.fs-driver.org/) and the ntfs-3g package for linux. Both read and wrote perfectly fine and i never lost any data or files with either method.

I'm using SUSE but 10.2 but other distros should work as well.

1) Ensure FUSE is installed and must be > 2.6.0 DO NOT HOWEVER USE 2.6.2.

Current version is 2.6.3

Once that's up and installed then install ntfs-3g.

The ntfs-3g system relies on the FUSE file subsystem for access to NTFS.

The great thing about FUSE is that it separates the file writing from the OS which is really great as you only need to plug in the appropriate module for the file system you want to access in this case ntfs-3g for NTFS.

Works brilliantly.

Cheers

-K

It is amazing the number of Ffs that can be used with Fuse. sshfs to cdfs.

Brian