Using USB external hard drive

[DoctorVell]

Hi there,

I am currently running Ubuntu 11.10 via WUBI installation and I have an external 2tb external hard drive. When installing it, it recognized the hard drive right away and lets me copy files from my "partition" of Ubuntu to that hard drive. I am wondering how do I make it so I can actually execute programs from there? I know how to do it via the main "partitiion" but if I get a large selection of files, I'd like to be able to execute them from that hard drive. How do I set the permissions for me to do this. Like I said, I can read files, copy files to it (and even from it) but I would like to execute them too (within certain folders). If this is not possible, do I have to make my main hard drive exclusive Ubuntu in order to do this. I don't want have to reformat my hard drive as I have lots of data on it (YES, it is backed up but I prefer not to do that all over again).

-- Thanks

[sgosnell]

Set the executable bit on the binary files you want to run. You can either run them by giving the fully-qualified path/filename in a terminal, or by creating desktop files, which are the Linux equivalent of shortcuts. You don't need to make any changes to your hard drive.

[Rubberman]

What file system are you using on the USB drive? If you want to use it to run executables in a Linux environment, then you REALLY need to format it with a Linux file system. Most likely it is either formatted as a fat-32 or ntfs file system, neither of which will properly support Linux user/group/permissions bits in the file system metadata. IE, they are great for data storage, but worthless for system use!

[MikeTbob]

In addition to what has already been posted. I would partition the drive however you want but also to include one Linux partition and the rest can be what ever you want or you could dedicate the entire drive to Linux partitions. Add the new partition info to /etc/fstab and away you go. No need to modify the partition containing Ubuntu/Windows. Hope this helps.

[DoctorVell]

I am just going to leave it as for DATA only, as my WUBI partition holds a lot of files. I will probably get another laptop and another external hard drive and then I will use that for my Linux files and stuff for if I ever need it.