WinXP: External Hard Drive

[electroman6913]

A few months ago I bought a 500 GB USB external hard drive. It work great on Ubuntu. but my Windoz Xp wont open It. I have it formated as fat32 should I reformat it to ntfs and if so can I do that on Ubuntu or do I have to do it in Xp.

[nujinini]

I think it might be better to reformat it to ntfs and you can use a linux tool called gparted. You can get it through your ubuntu. It has a very simple, easy to use, drag and click GUI.

If you don't have gparted yet, you can go to your ubuntu terminal and execute:

$ sudo apt-get install gparted

[Cabhan]

You can reformat to NTFS in Linux with gparted, as nujinini says.

However, I wouldn't really suggest that. FAT is great because everything understands it; I haven't followed Linux's NTFS support for a long time, but it used to have a lot of problems.

It sounds to me that your FAT partitioning may be incorrect, as all of my computers (Linux, Mac, and Windows) have always been able to read any of my FAT drives. So I would suggest sticking with FAT and figuring out what's wrong instead of going over to NTFS.

[Lostfarmer]

I will mostly agree with Cabhan, unless you will want to put big files on it. Do not remember the max file size (4g?) but I have hit the limit and had to think why it would not save. Very irritating.

What error in XP do you get ? You could use 'testdisk' and check the boot record. Did you format it with fat32 using linux or XP ? Did you change the default cluster size when you formated ? Post the output of 'fdisk -l'.

[electroman6913]

I formated it in Linux , Windoz can see the Hard drive but is location is a 0 and their is no drive letter assigned to it. and it won't give me the choice to assing a drive letter to is.

[Lazydog]

Can you post the output from FDISK for this device?

run

fdisk /dev/<ext. drive>

Then press p and report that information.

[nujinini]

... FAT is great because everything understands it; I haven't followed Linux's NTFS support for a long time, but it used to have a lot of problems.

It sounds to me that your FAT partitioning may be incorrect, as all of my computers (Linux, Mac, and Windows) have always been able to read any of my FAT drives. So I would suggest sticking with FAT and figuring out what's wrong instead of going over to NTFS.

Thanks for this info. All the while I thought NTFS offered more advantage than FAT. I have to study this more

[Rubberman]

If you are using the drive mostly for Windows, but also Linux, my experience is that NTFS is far more reliable than FAT, especially for large drives (>40GB). Windows doesn't do well with Linux file systems, other than with some add-on software that gives you read-only access. However, Linux in its current incarnations can deal with NTFS partitions without problems, though I'm not sure about encrypted directories. For external drives that are used solely with Linux, I use generally either ext2 or ext3 file systems. For external drives that are used with both Linux and Windows I use NTFS for big ones, and fat32 for small ones, such as thumb drives.

[electroman6913]

Thanks I put ntfs on half of the drive and I'll change the fat32 to ext what is the difference between ext2 and ext3

[Rubberman]

FWIW, I use ext2 for file systems that contain mostly large files (videos, etc), and ext3 for those that have a more general mix of files.