LinuxQuestions.org - xp and fedora file sharing within the same pc

First of all, remember that using FAT32 you cannot set UNIX-like file permissions (owner/group read/write/execute etc.) - so everything you put on FAT32 is available for everyone that can access the mount point..

If I were you, I'd resize the partitions and give Linux a bit more space, but that's your own decicion.

What you do is simply mount the desired FAT32 partitions under Linux. An example: let's create two directories under /mnt that you mount your two different FAT32 partitions into (all the lines starting with # are comments that you are not supposed to write):

Code:

# first obtain superuser rights, since that's needed;

# type the password when asked

su

mkdir /mnt/part1

mkdir /mnt/part2



# now that the mount points are created, let's mount the drives.

# In this example let's say we want to mount Windows drives C and D

# that appear to be two partitions on the first harddisk, so they

# are hda1 and hda2 under Linux in this example. Let's edit fstab with

# vim - if you don't have it or like to use something else, do it



vi /etc/fstab



# scroll down to the bottom, press A (that is, press shift+a) and ENTER

# to get a new line, then type the following 2 lines:



/dev/hda1 /mnt/part1 vfat users,rw,auto 0 0

/dev/hda2 /mnt/part2 vfat users,rw,auto 0 0



# now press ESC then write :wq (that is, press shift-dot then w and q and ENTER)

# to save and exit vim.

Now after

Code:

mount -a

you should get the first partition on the first harddrive (hda1, usually windows "C") to be present under /mnt/part1 and the second partition ("D") under /mnt/part2. Now the partitions are there, but probably accessible by root only - to change this, you'll need to edit your security settings (probably add your user to some group?) which depend on the distribution you use. If you wanted to grant everybody (EVERYBODY!) access to the drives, you would add an option umask=022 to the options in the two fstab lines (after auto, for example). But it's wiser to just give access to some users you trust; you can do that in multiple ways I think..umask is only one of them. Giving your user or group ID to umask option (mentioned above) should grant you access too..

That's about it. If you like to mount the drives elsewhere, change the directory names (part1 and part2) and change the fstab lines accordingly. If you don't like the partitions to get mounted automatically, remove auto from the fstab lines. If you want more, read man fstab to get more knowledge on what you can do..

Oh - and if (when) you want to mount different partitions (I'm not sure if hda1 and hda2 are what you want), just alter the example above.