Hope you guys don't mind seeing lots of posts from me, 'cause I'm a Linux n00b!

Anyway, I now can mount my 160GB USB external Hard Drive which makes me happy! And I don't care if I have to manually mount it everytime. Terminal likes to save past commands which is great. But now I need to beable to write to the 160GB drive. I don't want to format it since I have a lot of stuff on it (and I mean a lot). It is the largest Hard Drive in the house, and I don't have enough blank DVD's to burn the contents. Besides, I don't need 36 DVD's that have the stuff from my hard drive lying around the house! I have enough optical media thats just lying around!

I was told that if I convert the drive to the FAT file system, that Windows can read and write to it (duh!) as well as Linux. If this is the case, then thats all I need to do since I take the drive with me sometimes and it gets connected to a Windows box.

So, my question is this... If I convert the HDD to FAT32, will SuSE (and any other distro of Linux) beable to read and write to the drive? If not, what file system should I use to allow both Windows AND Linux to read and write to the drive?

Yes, FAT32 is your filesystem of choice! You may have a try on the captive-ntfs driver (which allows write access to ntfs from Linux), but this is slow and requires the Windows driver to be installed.

ok... how would I go about using the captive-ntfs driver? where would I get it the drivers?

Don't take this the wrong way, but the answers to those questions can be found by using goooooogle
To get you started: here's the captive project
Good luck!

JJ

I was searching google all last night, and everything that I came across said to convert the drive to FAT32, or to format the drive as the Linux partition. but thanks!

Support for writing to NTFS partitions from within Linux is still in an experimental stage, meaning that there should be no expectations that it will work. If you want to be able to have a partition which can be read from and written to using either Linux or Windows, then using the FAT32 file system is pretty much the way to go.

It's also worth pointing out that there is no utility (that I'm aware of anyway) that would convert an entire disk from one file system to another. Instead, what I'd suggest is that you resize the existing partition (making it smaller) and then creating a new partition using this newly-available space. That way both Windows and Linux can continue to use their native file systems, plus you'd have a "common" space that could be accessed by both. -- J.W.

ok, well I've set it up so that i have to manually mount the drive. And since my drive is fux0r3d I'm going to RMA it. And hopefully someone will be nice and lend me a 120GB Hard Drive until I can get my 160GB Hard Drive back (my primary drive is a 60GB Laptop drive). If I can get my paws on a 120GB drive, I'll format it as FAT32 and try things out! And then when my 160GB drive comes back to me, I'm going to use Partition Magic to format the drive as FAT32

You dont have to manually mount it every time, have a look at /etc/fstab and you'll see (just add the information) have a google on it

Use captive-ntfs. Granted, it's a bit slow...but it's easy to set up and it works...on every distro I've ever tried (Many).

Can someone tell me what steps I need to take to get suse using the captive ntfs driver once I install the rpm and copy the two ntfs files to the directory it says they are supposed to be in (/usr/lib/captive I think)? I'm missing something.


Thanks!