I have a dual boot win2000/Debian system. I have added a program to windows so it will read the linux drives. Now I want to make both systems have a common "Documents" file....ie have windows "MyDocuments" be /hda5/Documents instead of c:\MyDocuments.

In Linux I would just replace c:\MyDocuments with a symlink pointing to /hda5/Documents.

What is the windows equivalent of a Linux symlink?

Thanks

That won't work. If you want to share a directory, repartition your disk and add a fat32 partition to put your Documents on.

There isn't one.

Some things to understand, windoze can read and write fat file systems and ntfs file systems. That is about it. I have heard of a driver for windoze to read and write ext2 partitions, but I would't trust anything I valued to windoze.

Linux has many more file systems, ext2, ext3, rieser and some more windoze has no idea how to read or write. Linux can read and write fat, and with the ntfsg3 driver installed.

So, if you don't want to re-partition, then keep the documents files on a partition linux can read/write. There are many How-Tos on how to make this work.

What file system are you using on the windoze system?

In windows, you can change the location of "special folders", like My Documents. If your common Documents folder shows up in windows without you having to do anything, then you should just be able to change this location to the common documents folder.

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310147 for more info.

I've also requested this thread be moved, since it's not technically a Linux question.

edit: This may also be problematic since there's likely to be some permissions problems - how will windows know who owns any new files you create in the Documents folder from within windows? Unless this is something you tell this program you "have added ... to windows" (which program is it?).

Since this is an interoperability issue I'm going to leave it here.

Windows is win2000 on vfat; I didn't trust linux ntfs drivers so I stayed with vfat. I have had a bad experience with linux corrupting an ntfs system in the past.

I have installed ext2ifs on the windows system to access the linux drives, all of which are ext3. So far it seems to be working without any problems although googling turns up some other users who have had trouble with it.

I don't use windows much, there are really only about 3 programs that I use that will not run in wine. These are (1) an income tax program (2) a Cad program and (3) Canon PhotoRecord which gets used quite a bit for printing photos. BUT, almost all windows programs want to put their data in "My_Documents" by default and start all their "open file" searches there. It would be so much easier if "MyDocuments" was the same documents folder that everything else (meaning Linux appications) uses.

My current drive partition setup is: I used to use a vfat partition for data but switched to ext3 as soon as I was convinced that it was possible to access it from windows since ext3 is more reliable. Another reason is the 4G filesize limit with vfat which means that a dvd .iso cannot be craeted on a vfat system.

Just had time for a brief look at it but it looks like the microsoft's procedure for changing the default location of "MyDocuments" may give me the results I want. A symlink would have been so much easier!

Thanks