Re: Sharing data with a dualboot (Windows XP and Ubuntu 6.06)

Steven Mocking wrote:
Jef Driesen wrote:
What is the most reliable method to share a partition with data between
both operating systems? Currently the partition is formated with NTFS
filesystem, but access is read-only in Linux.

I see two options:

1. Format the partition to FAT32. This seems to be the most easy
solution, but the partition is a very large one (110GB) and I don't know
how well FAT32 can handle that. And if I'm correct FAT32 also does not
support for very large files (e.g. DVD images).

I've tried this for a while and DVD images are usually too large for FAT32, which drove me nuts.

I made a decision and converted the partition to FAT32. For those large files, I can put them on a separate partition. DVD images don't change often, so I can live with read-only access in one of the two OS.

2. Format the partition to ext3 and use the Windows driver from
http://www.fs-driver.org/. But I have never used that driver and I don't
know how reliable it is.

The driver is pretty stable. The only downside is that it mount the ext3 as ext2, so the journal doesn't match the filesystem. This causes Linux to check the filesystem with every boot. If the filesystem is very large this can take a while. Otherwise I've found this pretty convenient compared to option 1.

Unfortunately, pretty stable is not good enough for my personal data. I don't want to risk loosing my data.

Are there any other options?

At work, we use a file server with NFS and Samba for this, but that's overkill for home use and will be a bit sluggish without Gigabit Ethernet.

Even on a home network, a server can be very useful (especially when using multiple computers). But I don't have one for the moment...
.

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