home directory on FAT32
 

Dear all,
I am currently dual-booting between windows 2000 and slackware 9.1. I have a lot of files that I want to access in both environments and it is very inconvenient to copy files to removable storage. What I want is to have a FAT32 partition to store the data, so that it may be read/write by windows and linux.

What would be even better would be if I could store my /home/user directory on this FAT32 partition. Is this even possible? If it is, how do I go about achieving this, or where can I find more information?

Admittedly, this isn't a life-or-death issue, but it would definitely smooth my eventual transition to 100% linux. Therefore, any help would be greatly appreciated. =]

Thanks,

Karhoo~!

hhmmm, good question, very good!!
I have a spare slack 9.0 setup I use for .......experiments.
I will post back here with my results.........I dont think I can
fubar it too much if I do this as a regular user, and CD# 2 of slack 9 CD set is a rescue disk so........
if need be I can re-set /etc/fstab if things go.........wrong. but will
try it and let you know......he he :)

Putting your home dir on a FAT partition will probably be unfeasible, as Windows filesystems don't support Linux permissions. All your files will have to have the same permissions (set in the fstab), how will one decide whether a file is executable or not? If you don't have space anywhere else, I suggest putting a loopback file on the FAT partition, formatting it, and using it as yout home dir.

aaa is right...........
it won't work, there is a KDE-socket issue and the DCOPServer cant access
fat32 at all...........KDE just would not start........I tried tho.....
interesting concept........perhaps in the "near" future we will
be able to do this, it would make Bill G. very irked if we could......LOL

Thanks for the replies, guys... Well, I guess that's that then. I was thinking of reformatting my windows partition to FAT32, coz right now, it is NTFS, which linux can't write to properly yet...

BTW, what is a loopback file on the FAT partition that aaa is talking about?

You might want to look at umsdos, which adds linux features to dos filesystems. You just mount a FAT32 partition as umsdos, and it will work in Linux (there are several disadvantages though).

A loopback file is a file that acts like a hd or partition. You make a big file, format it, then mount it with the '-o loop' option. You can nest a Linux filesystem in a another filesystem this way.

makes a 1 gig file
dd if=/dev/zero of=/bigfile.img bs=1k count=1000000
formats it. it will ask for confirmation
mke2fs /bigfile.img
mounts the file. assumes that '/mnt/loop' exists
mount /bigfile.img /mnt/loop -o loop