Good Morning

I have a new external hard disk.

I want it to be used in both in Linux(4.3) and windows(XP or and VISTA)

Can any one please tell through which filesystem should i need to format the external hard drive?

Waiting for your email

Thanks and Regards
Rehan

NTFS should suffice...

What is Linux 4.3?

No e-mail. Replies on the forum so everyone benefits.

You can use several filesystems for shared data between Linux and Windows. The easy way is FAT32.

I prefer to use ext3 for shared data---when in Windows, I use the ext2fsd driver to read the ext3 drives.

I had formated the external hardiskusing the NTFS filesystem, but when i connect it to linux machine its not able to mount, its giving the error fs type not supported.

FAT32 will be the safest, will work with anything.

Here you go : http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...AT32_Partition

If you want to write to an external drive using NTFS, you will probably want to use the "ntfs-3g" filesystem. It is a user-mode driver. Look in your package manager for "fuse" and "ntfs-3g" and "ntfs-tools".

Also check with "lsmod | grep fuse" to see if you already have the "fuse" kernel module loaded. If not run "sudo /sbin/modprobe fuse". Then see if your system recognizes the filesystem when you plug in the external drive. Most newer distro's will automount file system for you under /media.

You will be able to read and write to an NTFS filesystem, but if there is a problem, the ntfs tools program to repair it only repairs some obvious errors. Then it marks the drive as needing checking so that Windows will finish checking the drive & hopefully repair it. If you didn't have a computer running windows, you wouldn't want to use NTFS.

If you wish to create a fat32 filesystem on a very large drive, you may need to do so in Linux. Windows won't create one beyond a certain size.

you can make a partition in the FAT32 FS, the safest option if drive is more than 4GB. you can make ntfs, but it is not recommended as your linux can break it by accident (it happened to me once, windows didn't see the data after that).
alternatively, you can download ext2/3 driver for windows here. i tried and it worked fine.