I have been having a real problem getting a good back up share available in Samba for my Windows XP Pro system. I'd like to be able to do a complete system backup which would be about 16 GB. I've never had any luck completing a large backup and I just recently observed that the backup stopped when the file was about 2 GB and I would get an error report:

First, my XP installation is in NTFS. I've tried a few things. I am running Samba on Red Hat 9.0, I think and the FAT32 partition to be shared is on another drive. I tried formatting the MS created partition in FAT and NTFS. I can't seem to mount the FAT formatted share and I think I understand that you cannot write to NTFS in Linux yet. So a FAT32 formatted partition is the only file system that I can get Samba to share. I've also tried the mount option in /etc/fstab specifying "fat=32" and still no change. I also tried changing the block size specified in the share to show "block = 512" from the default "block =1024" to no effect.

So what can I do? I've looked up the specifications for FAT32 for MS and it says that you should be able to write up to 4 GB, but I'm not getting that. Is this just a natural limitation of Samba? How can I get Samba to write large files for purposes of backup? Is this an XP problem?

And and all tips or clues would be appreciated.

AFAIK FAT32 max file size is 2GB.

I'm not sure I really understand what you are trying to do. Are you trying to run a backup on a dual boot computer or a network computer? If on the same computer then you do not need samba and can mount the NTFS partition as read only. If a network computer you should be able to mount a NTFS partition as read / write.

Yes, this is Samba being run on a seperate computer. I thought I might have made that clear here:

Are you sure you can get Linux to write to NTFS files? It seems to me I've read in a couple places that this is not possible. I'll certainly give it a try.

I've tried formatting the partition as NTFS and mounting it as NTFS and I am getting a system error on boot saying, "NTFS fs not supported by kernel". My fstab file has "ntfs" as the file type to be mounted for that partition entry. Actually, I see in the manual for "mount" (man mount) that ntfs is listed as a file type for option -t, so that would suggest to me that it might be available some way.

RH9 does not support ntfs for either read or writing. I understand there is an rpm that will give you ntfs read functionality. I have never used it. There is no support for NTFS writing in Linux. It is still at an experimental stage, I believe. Also the max file size in fat32 is 4 Gb. Since that's the case you'll never get a 16 GB file saved on the drive. Could you format the drive w/ ext3 maybe? Or are you trying to keep it formatted in Microsoft file type.

Where you have fat=32 in your /etc/fstab.... This is confusing to me. I use "vfat". Maybe you could put your fstab file up here for us. First you need to reformat your drive back to FAT32.

There is an effort here, http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ to give NTFS support to distributions that do not have it. The effort does not include the functionality to write to NTFS. You simply cannot set permissions to write for the mounted file system. More information on the functionality of this particular effort is here, http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#3.2.

If anyone thinks that it is possible to write to an NTFS file system in any way from Linux, be sure to tell us how.

The fat=32 setting is placed in the same space as "rw", "default" and other options like that. It is a mount option described for the vfat file system in the manual for mount. If I want to keep backups for XP Pro on a Samba share, would I be able to do that with a mounted ext3 file system? I thought the whole point of Samba was to serve MS type file systems mounted on a Linux machine. Sure, I can see the other file systems when the shares are available, but I never figured the mounted drives would be any use.

I'll give it a try.

if u want to backup your drive i reccomend an NFS hosted share on your linux box and a win32 nfs mount client for the windows machine this should work for your needs

That's a new angle. So where do I get an NFS client for my XP Pro?

Yes, you can definately share partitions/folders using the ext3 format. It is better than fat32 in all ways(probably, anyways). If you are sharing w/ samba on Linux then it would be the prefered method.

The Win/Lin NFS idea does sound interesting. Do tell more.

i have never used the win32 client i have muli linux box's however this looks promising

http://download.com.com/3120-20-0.ht...ent&tg=dl-2001

u can also do a google/yahoo search for "windows xp nfs client" and get some more results

you will be able to mount this share as a shared drive and then u can set window's up to a automatic update say ever week or so to the NFS share.

for more info "man nfs"

I'll have a look at that. What is "muli linux box's"?

sry multiple linux box's

Well, all this time I never thought once that I could write an MS file to an ext3 file systems and I just wrote a huge backup to an ext3 share in Samba. So ...

Problem Solved.

Thanks to all who tuned in and offered some suggestions.

By the way, Microsoft's Sevices For UNIX is now free (used to be $99) and it includes an NFS client and NFS server. You can check out the System Requirements