using FAT32 anyways?

kiddo · 01-15-2005, 07:35 PM

Greetings!

just a quick question, don't want to burden you with a big story right now (maybe later heheh), how does linux behave with FAT32 partitions? What I mean is, can it behave better than winslows? Please tell me linux is able to avoid fragmentation on this filesystem!

That's for personal info purposes, if it can't behave like a real filesystem should, I guess I'll have to get a 200gb harddrive + usb2 HD enclosure, and backup everything under the sun as a fat partition on that external drive, THEN convert the main drive to ReiserFS. Then have rsync make some backups between the two.

The reason I may want to keep fat is if I ever need to get back in windows in emergency (no dual boots for me), I would still own my data.

Thoughts?

frob23 · 01-15-2005, 08:10 PM

You could split the drive into two sections leaving one FAT32 for your user data and using a proper filesystem for linux.

I would highly discourage FAT32 for the main partitions... as it wouldn't retain permissions, doesn't like *nix filenames, and for tons of other reasons... frankly it is the worst possible filesystem you could try and make linux use.

That is assuming it would use it at all. Which I am sure it could... with enough work and maybe a custom kernel.

kiddo · 01-15-2005, 08:11 PM

Ooops, sorry I forgot to clarify this point, gomen!
The SYSTEM partition will of course be in reiser, but I mean, for the data partition, how will linux behave? Sorry again

frob23 · 01-15-2005, 08:24 PM

That should be fine. Just set the umask permissions when you boot so that any other users can (or can't) access it as you desire. And remember that it might butcher weird names... like ones with several "."s in them.

As for the question about defragmenting. I do not believe the linux kernel maintains the FAT partition to that level. But I could be wrong.

ilikejam · 01-15-2005, 08:27 PM

Linux can read and write FAT32 partitions just fine. I don't know if the performance is any better than Windows with respect to partitioning, though.

Dave

kiddo · 01-15-2005, 10:14 PM

Hi, finally I've googled myself, and FAT is a fragmenting FS by itself. For thou who can read French, here's my source:
http://linuxfr.org/forums/10/5272.html

Learned something new today. But come to think of it, if the problem was in the kernel, it could've been fixed in windows XP (or whatever) so that fragmentation wouldn't be a problem anymore ... bah ^^