Mandrake 9.2 data sharing with Windows 98SE
 

I have just built a PC from scratch and set up a dual partition for Mandrake 9.2 and Windows and now want to create a shared FAT32 drive.

There is no obvious setup procedure guidance in the Mandrake manual or menus or maybe I am not looking hard enough but I picked up some generic advice from this site on creating a shared FAT32 partition. Then got stumped as it this refers to a tool called 'mkfs.vfat' which is not on my distribution 3 CD set. I can't seem to find any down load sites.

There appear to be downloads available for version like Redhat with this MKFS tool. Will these work on in Mandrake 9.2?

Also are these any alternate ways to set up a shared drive feature other than use of mkfs?

JP:confused:

if you want to add a fat32 drive to your system that both windows and linux can use, all you gotta do basically is format the drive using your regular windows format utility...

windows will see the drive automagically, while on linux you'll have a choice as to mounting it when you need to access it, or setting-up your fstab to have it mount automagically every boot...

for example, if you added the fat32 drive as the ide secondary master (one fat32 partition):

mkdir /mnt/windows

mount -t vfat /dev/hdc1 /mnt/windows

then you'd be able to access the drive from linux by going into the directory /mnt/windows...

to automate it, you'd need to tinker with your /etc/fstab file, adding something like this to it (your milage will vary):

/dev/hdc1 /mnt/windows vfat defaults 1 2

what you actually put into your fstab depends on how you want the partition to behave once it's mounted...

here's some deeper fstab info:

http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man5/fstab.5.html

http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/book/node57.html

http://www.linuxforum.com/linux_tutorials/14/1.php

i hope this helps...

Thanks excellent advice, exactly what I needed.

you're very welcome!!!

=)