Hi, i have a 200gb external disk. I'd like to write to it in linux but it's currently formatted with NTFS. Which filesystem can be read and written by both Windows and Linux and make 200gb partitions? (cause i read somewhere FAT32 disks can't be that big).

Steven

NTFS writing is supposed to be pretty safe in 2.6.15. Otherwise just make a few FAT32 partitions.

i don't know if fat32 has problems getting that large, but i'd suggest you tried to research that further... maybe it'd get limited at 128Gb, couldn't say... Linux can read NTFS reasonably well now, but writing to it is still a very dicey affair, and i'd never recommend it. if fat32 IS not an option ,then there are no other filesystems that are happily usable under both operating systems sadly... If you rig is powerful enough, maybe you'd want to think about running one inside a virtual machine (vmware server is free now), and actually interacting via network filesystems, i.e. SMB / CIFS via samba under linux. I wouldn't suggest running your entire windows system under a virtual machine if you want to boot to it normally to (it'd have to drop and rediscover the hardware ever single time) but maybe you could install a secondary copy of windows that does nothing but share the filesystem you want. it'd be much lighter on resources that way too. Alternatively you could store the data on a linux filesystem (YAY!) and then use an obscenely small distro like DamnSmallLinux to host the same filesystem via samba when you are not booted into linux. This way round would be simpler actually, as a totally full featured DamnSmall installation is just 200mb (including plenty of spare space actually) which you can install into a file on the windows filesystem. Just means running VMware under windows... yuck compared to running under linux, but would mean a better performance on average across the two seperately bootable systems.

FAT32 partitions can be that big. Windows fs utility is limited - that's true, just use Linux utilities instead.

personally i've NEVER managed to get a fat32 filesystem under linux that windows hasn't complained about and refused to use...

The answer is limited mostly by windoze, fat16 fat32 and for completeness fat12. Windoze will not talk to any other file system supported by linux, and there is quite a list. Fat32 is your only real choice.

As for the 200 gig size, I know there is a limit for fat32, but I'm not sure what it is. The limit is assosciated with the cluster numbering. As the partition size increases, the number of sectors per cluster increases with fat32. The problem is wasted space (if you care with 200 gig's). If you write, say a 1 k file, it will take up all the sectors in a cluster, and be contained in one sector.

Personally, I would not format a 200 gig drive with one partition with any file system. That much data is just too difficult to back up. I would make several fat32 partitions, of say 30 gig's each.

The max possible size for a FAT32 filesystem is 2TB but having one that big would be silly. Windows won't let you create one bigger than 32GB because once they get too much bigger than that fragmentation becomes a more noticable problem. Just make the 186-ish GB partition in FAT32 and see how it goes, if you notice it not performing up to scratch you can start looking at alternatives.

You can get a plugin for windows to read the reiserfs.

There are tools on windows to access any linux fs.
Linux fs is safer than windows NTFS, FAT32 or FAT16 because those fs are wild guesses whereas linux fs are documented.