Ok, I'm thinking of installing Ubuntu on a 68GB SCSI disk I have laying around. I don't wish to dual boot. Once installed, I will then slave 2 more hard drives:

#1 - 500GB SATA data disk (data only & no OS files, taken from my Windows 7 pc)
#2 - 500GB SATA unformatted disk (brand new)

My questions are:

* after working with (adding files, etc) the data disk that used to be in my Win 7 pc, will the disk still be readable to Windows if I slide it back into my Windows box, or will Ubuntu mess with the file table/structure/etc?

* how can I format the brand new disk so that if I move it to over my Windows box I'll be able to read the data? Will I be able to format it NTFS in Ubuntu or does this need to be done from within Windows?

* I plan on using the 2 500GB SATA disks as my "Home" storage, where all my pics/movies/music/etc will be stored. What scheme should I implement on the SCSI system disk so I don't have my home (user?) storage on it thus creating unnecessary duplicates & stuff? Should it just be "/" & "swap"?

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.

1. Not sure with the windows 7 beta, if it's still the normal NTFS style then you should be able to install the ntfs-3g driver that should make it readable to linux, it should be able to read and write fine but i'd advise being careful to back-up data that maybe important to you.

2. The disc should be formatable as ntfs with the correct programs but it would be better to do it from windows. I would advise fat32/vfat for storage meant for going between OSs as it tends to be the most portable as long as it does not hold operating system files. I have not done formatting of discs in Ubuntu or any other Debian based distributions, under red hat based ones fdisk and mkfs.vfat would be sufficent to rewrite the partition table and format the partition.

3. If you create just a / then it'll automatically related /home to a file within / however the basic / and swap partisions should be suffience. You should be able to change /etc/fstab to make the secondary drive mount as /home as long as their is always one in the system it should work fine.

In my inexpert opinion.

1) As long as you don't do any thing fancy, mount your disks in the normal way, limit your use to basic file operations, and don't mess with any necessary Windows files on the disk, I doubt there will be any trouble. Every thing I've heard is that the ntfs-3g driver is safe to use.

Of course if there's one thing that's guaranteed in computing, it's that nothing is guaranteed.

2) I don't know if there are any nfts formating programs available in Linux, but I'd do it in Windows anyway. It's probably safer that way. Since it's a patented Microsoft filesystem, they're the only ones who really know everything about it. After it's formatted you can use it safely on Linux, as above.

3) I'm not 100% clear on what you intend here. I wouldn't use an ntfs-formatted partition for my home directory though, since posix file permissions and ownership are rather important things, and you have config files and such in ~/ that may need them. I personally would rely on the KISS principle here and put a small home directory on the main disk to hold your system-important stuff, then mount the two ntfs drives in subdirectories inside it. Or something like that anyway.

Another option might be to create a small ext3 home partition on one of the bigger disks instead for your /home, but then you'd have to have it available every time you log in. I don't know if that's important to you, though it does sound like you intend the two big drives to be removable.

There are also ext2/3 drivers available for Windows, if you want to look at doing it the other way around. I don't know if they support Win7 yet though.

Thanks for the quick reply, gentlemen. Much appreciated! David, no I don't want to use NTFS on my system disk. I will be using ext3. My question pertained more towards the partition makeup. Since I do not want my home directory on this disk (it will spread out on my 500GB drives), I was asking if I should simply put / & swap on the system disk?

You may be better off putting your /home on the system disk and putting the mount points of your 500GB drives within /home.

From your initial posts, it sounded like you wanted to mount at least one of the drives at /home directly, which would make your home directory sit on the larger ntfs drive. And that's what I don't recommend doing.

You'll be all right with just / and swap partitions on the main disk. In that situation /home will simply be a directory under /. Then you can mount the other devices in subfolders inside your /home/user directory. The only concern you might have is making sure you don't overstuff the main /home itself, since that will fill up space on the first disk.