suitable file system?

[musasabi]

alright... so i got sick and tired of running one 40 gig drive with windows and two 20 gig drives with linux on one and my multimedia on the other. so, of course, i nabbed up a 200 gig drive from newegg. wahoo.

it will be ariving tomorrow, and ive been pondering this sort of a setup...

two 20 gig partitions for two flavors of linux... one will be slackware and one will be for play. one 60 gig partition for windows and all of my non-*nix games. and finally, one 100 gig partition for my multimedia.

now, id like to be able to read and write this multimedia partition with both windows and linux... but the only way i know to do this is with the fat32 filesystem. dont really wanna do that.

so, any ideas?

[zachtib]

yeah, afaik, fat32 is the only partition that will allow you to do that, I had a pc that was 20win 20 linux and 40 shared, and had to use fat32.

I think there is program called explore2fs or something that will allow windows to read other filesystems but not sure if you can write to them

[dylunio]

now, id like to be able to read and write this multimedia partition with both windows and linux... but the only way i know to do this is with the fat32 filesystem. dont really wanna do that.

so, any ideas?

THe only suggesting would be to overcome your fear of FAT32 and use it, since this is the only way I know of that lets you read/write in both win and lin, since linux can't yet write to ntfs without a high change of corruption.

[Indigno]

alright... so i got sick and tired of running one 40 gig drive with windows and two 20 gig drives with linux on one and my multimedia on the other. so, of course, i nabbed up a 200 gig drive from newegg. wahoo.

it will be ariving tomorrow, and ive been pondering this sort of a setup...

two 20 gig partitions for two flavors of linux... one will be slackware and one will be for play. one 60 gig partition for windows and all of my non-*nix games. and finally, one 100 gig partition for my multimedia.

now, id like to be able to read and write this multimedia partition with both windows and linux... but the only way i know to do this is with the fat32 filesystem. dont really wanna do that.

so, any ideas?

Well, I know for a fact that FAT32 will work, but if you really want to, you can see if NTFS works.

BTW, can you send me your old HDD's? XD

[musasabi]

ha, ok.

dylunio - well... i dont fear it, i just dont like it. the clusters for a 120 gig partition will be will be the size of rhode island. and journaling is always nice.

indigno - hahaha, ya know? we will see how many drives i end up with spare. :P

[twoHats]

I just upgraded a 40G for an 80G and used knoppix to do the partitioning and cp

it worked great - that way i coulld remove the drive that was to stay and put the new 80 in with the 40 for the format and copy - worked flawlessly except for wierd reporting afterwords (see Misc forum df - du reporting) which may not have anything to do with Knoppix.

Have fun with all that space - I wish i had better info for you, but i use fat32 for my share also ...

One thing - i have found fdisk to be much more useful than parted.

[musasabi]

well, this kinda sucks.

apparently i can only have 4 partitions per hard disk. that snuffs the multiple linux installs on one drive.

also, i guess windows cant make 100 gig fat32 partitions... or at least im not sure how to make it. sooo, i guess ill just use ext3 and only be able to read it from windows. *shrug* it will be alright.

thanks for the help guys.

[dylunio]

You can have more than 4 partitions on one disk.

You are alowed a maximum of 4 primery partitions. But if you take one of the primary partitions away you can repalce it with an extended partition. Within this extended partition you can have upto 64 logical partitions iirc.
| +++++Extended+++++ | Primary | Primary | Primary |
| Logical | Logical |

In the crude diagram above, you see yo have three primary partitions, one extended partition and two logical partitions. You can write to five partitions now, which are the 3 primary ond the two logical.

you can easily put linux on logical partitions, I myself have two linux distrobutions on logical patitions, so now you can have more than 4 partitions, note that windows must be on a primary partition.

[twoHats]

You can have more than 4 partitions on one disk.
<snip>
you can easily put linux on logical partitions, I myself have two linux distrobutions on logical patitions, so now you can have more than 4 partitions, note that windows must be on a primary partition.

Wow =- great reply with the diagram etc!

I also am using multiple partitions and have found fdisk in Linux to be an awsum tool for manipulating them. I even re-arranged a bunch of partitions on my drive recently - scary but it worked!

I believe, however, that windoze wants to be on the 1st partition. hda1 or hd0,0 or whatever. I tried loading Win2K on the second primarty and it immediately started talking about formatting hda1 etc -

Not absolutely positive about that - just a fading memory ...

Have fun - Tom

[greenpenguin]

You can have more than 4 partitions on one disk.

You are alowed a maximum of 4 primery partitions. But if you take one of the primary partitions away you can repalce it with an extended partition. Within this extended partition you can have upto 64 logical partitions iirc.
| +++++Extended+++++ | Primary | Primary | Primary |
| Logical | Logical |

In the crude diagram above, you see yo have three primary partitions, one extended partition and two logical partitions. You can write to five partitions now, which are the 3 primary ond the two logical.

you can easily put linux on logical partitions, I myself have two linux distrobutions on logical patitions, so now you can have more than 4 partitions, note that windows must be on a primary partition.

Nice explanation . I've got 6 partitions on my computer at the moment, although I'm gonna format it in about 10 minutes