Transferring files from windows to linux.. help! :D

Hi there,

my specs:
P4 1.8A Ghz
512ddr ram
asus p4 s333 mobo
40gb seagate hd
2 120gb seagate hd (connected using a ide controller)
os: winxp and slackware 9.1

i had been using redhat linux 9 (dual booting with winXP) for a while, however recently i had been getting corrupted files when transferring between the windows drives and the linux drives. for example i download say a movie to /home/me (formatted in ext3) and then decide to transfer it to one of my fat32 windows partitions which i have allocated for movies so that both os's can use them.
and when i go to open the vid is is all garbled....same goes for music.

any ideas on why this happens? Well it doesn't really matter cos now ia m with slackware 9.1 formatted using (reiser fs) i am going to shift predominantly to linux meaning that both my 120gb drives are gonna be linux formatted (reiser fs) except for the seperate 40gb ntfs winxp hd... cos i realise that linux is for me (one thing i get annoyed with is the constant battle with root and normal user permissions ;))

I am going to get my friends hard drive (filled with all sorts of goodies) soon...as i accidentally deleted a lot of my files (don't ask!) and what i basically would like to know is wether i can count on being able connect his hd to my pc to transfer from his hd (ntfs) striaght to my linux hard drive...without corrupting his files or just getting corrupted files being written to my drives....perhaps i should just transfer them to MY winxp drive first and then transfer them to the linux drives..wat do u think is the way to go?

btw....is there id3V2 mp3 tags in linux...all i seem to see is id3V1...?

...also what linux formatting is the way to go for me?... i'm generally working with fairly large files and cherish speed. (i'm thinking of doing a reformat and setting things straight...)

Thanks heaps.

Does the same thing happen if you transfer eg. a small text file over the partitions, and in that case, what changes occur? What mount flags do you use on the FAT partition?

i haven't noticed any thing with text files...

i'm not too sure what you mean by 'flags' but i thing u might mean the extra settings given in fstab when mounting a drive?..i cant quite remember them. something like /dev/hde5 /mnt/music vfat umask=000, defaults 00

i have reinstalled slackware since then and therefore have lost the stuff i entered in fstab.

i am not too worried as to why the corruption of music/movies occured...more of a curiousity thing...but i mainly would like to feel confident in transferring my friends files from ntfs to reiserfs (or to my ntfs and then to my reiser fs).....is reiser fs a good choice...? it seems it was kinda the default in slackware

Thanks again

The thing is that the fat drivers have some conversion utilities, similar to BIN->ASCII or the opposite for FTP (ie. it changes CRLF to LF and vice versa on all operations). I was thinking that you might have set that, and all LFs in your movies was converted to CRLFs. That might disturb things just a little...

Reiserfs is certainly a good choice. It offers very good performance and very good fragmentation characteristics.