Creating a FAT32 partition (in Windows) and accessing it in RH 8
 

Hello -

I am currently running WinXP and RH 8 in a dual-boot configuration on a notebook. I would like to create a FAT32 partition for sharing files between XP and RH (I have read that Linux has no difficulty reading from or writing to a FAT32, and XP doesn't either.) Will use Partition Magic 8.0 (running in XP) to create the FAT32 partition. My questions are these: (1) Does it matter if I create the new FAT32 partition as a logical or a primary partition; and (2) once the new partition is made, how do I access it in Linux?

Thanks in advance!

Jared :study: a linux noob

I think you mean primary and extended partition; but it doesn't matter - linux mounts everything :)

You will just have to determine which device (/dev directory) points to the desired partition ... it depends on several things:
is the drive on the first (0) or the second (1) ... IDE (SCSI) driver and is it master or slave (master drive on 1st ide driver is usually /dev/hda and it's first partition is /dev/hda1 ...)

And than, all that's left is to mount it, which is done the same way
as you mount your cdrom or floppy:

mount /dev/hd?? /mnt/shared

Of course there must be a valid entry in /etc/fstab in order this to work!
Something like:
/dev/hd?? /mnt/shared auto (for auto fstype selection) noauto,owner,rw 0 0

Ok, thanks very much!

I made some changes to the post ... a bunch of typing errors. Sorry