I searched and read posts about this issue, and I am not sure there is a consensus as to whether its a good thing to do or not.

Personally, I would never try to write to my Win2000 system partition. Too risky, and no real need, but my storage/data drives are both over 100G and I have no choice but to use NFTS, since in typical M$ fashion, FAT32 is good into the terrabytes, but there seems no way to format them as such :-) This really cuts down on my options from Linux, and sharing stuff between the two systems.

Is writing to NTFS proving to be reliable? I was at sourceforge, and not sure what the real world thinks of the project, so I am curious if folks have anything good or bad to say about it.

Heck, I would settle to know how to format my large drives FAT32, but I don't wish to drag a M$ topic into the forum.

Any recommends or suggestions, for my open Suse 10.2 system and writing to ntfs filesystems?

Thanks.

John

I don't quite get why you are having a format issue. I used to have a 150Gb partition as FAT32 for exactly the reasons you want one. I would assume I'd done the formatting from Windows. Mind you, it was over 12 months ago, so a don't recall the details

SuSE has ntfsprogs and ntfsprogs-fuse packages. There is a manpage for mount.fuse-ntfs.

Using ntfs-3g is proving 100percent reliable for both read and write according to their site. If you every have an issue they want to know.

Brian

Everything I've read has said that the new nfts-3g driver provides reliable read-write ability. I've never had an ntfs drive of my own to use it on however, so I can't confirm this directly. There may still be some limitations I haven't heard about.

The 32GB maximum file size for FAT32 is an arbitrary limitation of the MS format utility. mkdosfs is usually used to create dos/fat filesystems from Linux, and I'm not aware of any problems using it for formatting large drives. But even if FAT32 can technically be used on large disks, I don't think it works that well, at least not compared to more advanced journaling file systems. Wikipedia mentions that FAT32 becomes very inefficient beyond 32GB. Also, FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit, making it unsuitable for things like large media files and DVD images.

I'd say your best bet is to go ahead and try out the ntfs-3g driver, or else switch over to ext3 and install the Windows drivers available for it.

Well, as I said, don't wanna stuff this place full of M$ :-) but XP and win2K cannot format a FAT32 drive bigger than 32G. I didn't make it up, <g> its all over the net, and M$'s site, so if you were able to, I would call that an interesting anomaly, as when I try to format a 120G, it tries, and fails at the end, with the error message that M$ says is related to formatting more than 32G. I believe I read that Win98 can do bigger ones. Just another example of why I would like to roll away from windows one of these days.... :-)

Thanks

John

Thanks, I will check it out

John

Thanks. Here goes nothing! :-)

That will help me make the changeover more smoothly.

I may have done it from Linux. As I said, it was a year back. I don't even have the partition anymore as I wanted to add a couple more distros

Windows can use larger than 32gig partitions. They just can't create them. You can create one under linux. Many post on that on google.

Brian

I do believe that is exactly what I said......

I read so many post I forget what has been said when they start to get this long. Worst when you work with some that are over 30post long.

I think what happened is I posted that post to yours and it should have been on a different one.

Brian

No big, just the usual stuff out of Redmond, goofing everyone around and around :-)

Thanks Brian.

John

I installed the NTFS reader/writer from Paragon on someone's PC. Had to shell out $30 or 40? - but it works painlessly and stable. We "wine" some bits and pieces from the NTFS drive.
Had to be mounted by hand. fstab is not straightforward in Suse anymore, mounting has now it's own life (proc...) but I worked it out. Can't remember how.

I am dual booting with suse 10.2 and winxp I have a 100GB HD formatted ext3 and with the windows driver ext2IFS that you can DL here I have no problems with reading or writing from either OS. I have been running this for about 2 months now without fail
this also makes mounting easier since it's a linux FS


plus it's free