Hi,

I would like to use one of my HDD as a storage. Just pure storage; no OS, etc. I would like to unplug the storage and use it in Windows, and as I please, I want to unplug it and use it on my Linux.

What format should I choose to have both my systems recognize it.

I will assume, that you are talking about a USB disk drive, and that it cannot be accessed by both OS's at the same time, for instance a dual boot machine, that either runs a win32 OS, or Linux, but not both at once.

In this case, you are mostly limited by file systems that Windows can read natively, which is FAT32, NTFS. FAT32 is probablly the file system to use under these conditions, as Linus support for fat32 is good

If, on the other hand, you can access the Linux box from the Windows box, you have more options, such as formatting your drive with any file system you like (reiserfs, ext3, and others).

By then exporting the drive as a network share, an setting up SAMBA properly, you can access the drive from either, without having to unplug it, and transport it to the other machine.

I suggest you read all the doccumentation you can on the subject. www.computer-vet.com has good information. and there i sa lot more information on the web, For the above link, I searched google.com/linux for SAMBA file server

Again, unless the two machines are not networked, or are the same machine, there should be no need to move the HDD from one to the other

Hope this helps

jacks4u

Lets say, 1 at work, and 1 at home.

I would like to use my workplace's bandwidth to DL files, and I would trasnfer the files back and forth from work and home via a (external enclosure) storage drive I carry around.

My workplace woud have Windows, and my home would have Linux. What format should I reformat my storage drive so that both OS would recognize?

fat32 would probablly be your best chance.

I think. it should be easy, just take it to the windows box, and format it. then on your linux box, edit /etc/fstab to reflect that it's a fat32 file system, and all should be well

jacks4u

A couple of "heads-up" points & observations:

I concur on FAT32 vs. NTFS being the most painless choice here. BUT . . .

As you don't indicate he size of this drive, be aware that Windows imposes a more or less 32GB size limit on FAT32 partitions.

There are ways around this (none come to mind at the moment, though) and most of the drives I've dealt with come out of the box formatted FAT32 (all 120-160GB).

I've also observed SIGNIFICANT differences in performance/throughput between the two filesystems, sometimes approaching an order of magnitude, with FAT32 being the slower of the two. These were VERY large files, though -- 5GB Virtual machine files.

The max size of a FAT32 you can create in XP is 32GB. You can still access larger. You should be able to create a larger partition via linux.

The HDD will be 200 GB. What should I do if I cannot go beyond 32 GB or risk the slower speed?

In your situation, the performance issue should be all but moot:
1. The linux box won't like NTFS, anyway.
2. If you d/l directly to a folder on the USB drive, your network bandwidth is the limiting performance factor, here.

As far as formatting, you can try to make the whole drive one huge FAT32 filesystem via linux (as michaelk suggests above) or just use Windows disk manager to break it up into a number of partitions no larger than 32 GB, and create separate mount points for each of these in your linux box.

This assumes, of course, that none of the files you want to transfer are larger than 32GB (which is ENORMOUS, BTW.)

I don't want 6 partitions of 32 GB. I don't like looking into each partition over a file.

How do I make my drive one huge FAT32 filesystem with Linux? Are there any bad sides to using one huge FAT32?

Use linux fdisk command. AFAIK I think drives are already partitioned as FAT32 off the shelf.

If it's not FAT32 out of the box, or has been changed since, you should be able to get the whole thing back to Fat 32 (after re-partitioning, if necessary) with either a Win 98SE boot disk with fdisk and format on it, or from linux:

mkdosfs -F 32 -n <volumename> /dev/<dev name, usually sda, sdb, sdc, sdwhatever's next>

Assuming that your linux box main hard drive is not SCSI, the faormatting command should look something like this:

# mkdosfs -F 32 -n bigfat32 /dev/sda