Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

SavageMessiah · 2005-04-18 20:04:07

Is there some filesystem that can be written and read in both linux and windows reliably, without jumping through a lot of hoops? I plan on sticking a third hard drive in my computer, shifting my storage stuff to it, and usig my old storage drive for a linux dual boot (rather than using two comps) but I need an appropriate file system. Any ideas?

incinerator · 2005-04-18 20:12:30

If file permissions is not a big must-have for you I'd recommend fat32 aka vfat.

Afaik fat32 does not support proper file permission and ownership settings, that means when you mount a fat32 partition on linux you'll probably have to set some default permission and ownership flags for the complete filesystem (-> man mount).
There may be some problems with filename character translation. The manpage should point out what's important, too.

Alternatives would be using ntfs together with captive or using tools for Windows to access linux filesystems, I haven't got any links for that though.

Cheers,
Dominik[/url][/code]

phrakture · 2005-04-18 20:17:31

incinerator wrote:

Alternatives would be using ntfs together with captive or using tools for Windows to access linux filesystems, I haven't got any links for that though.

I have something on my windows partition called.... totalcommander or something like that - it allows you to access linux partitions... I can't recall if it's free or if I have shareware.... *shrug* - haven't booted windows in about 6 months

SavageMessiah · 2005-04-18 20:22:35

Does anyone know if ext2fs anywhere is worth the money?

phrakture · 2005-04-18 20:25:30

I doubt it

SavageMessiah · 2005-04-18 20:29:28

Hmm that captive thing looks pretty good. The webpage seems to indicate that it's pretty much perfectly compatible. Anybody have any firsthand experience with it that can back that up?

Heh, and it's in pacman too. Convenient.

shadowhand · 2005-04-18 20:40:23

NTFS writing is relatively new, and from I hear, it's not perfect. I guess the Captive team has made something really good, but I wouldn't rely on it to be 100% stable/compatable. I definately wouldn't use it for a production enviroment, but maybe I'm biased because of all the horror stories I've heard about NTFS partitions getting corrupted because of Linux writes.

Personally, I think vfat is more than enough for a simple shared drive.

lanrat · 2005-04-18 21:03:35

Yes, vfat (fat32) is IMO the best and most stable choice in this situation.
Don't be surprised when windows xp will not be able to format more that 32GB of fat32 partition. It can however read and write fine to bigger fat32 partitions (it just can't format it :-)).

Snowman · 2005-04-18 21:04:24

A few comments/hints:
Here's the line in my fstab for my fat32 partition:

/dev/discs/disc0/part3 /mnt/dos vfat noauto,user,rw,umask=077   1       0

. NB. I mount it manually (with mount /mnt/dos).

To read ext2/ext3 partitions from Windows, try explore2fs: http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

SavageMessiah · 2005-04-18 21:16:14

Vfat may be a bit of an issue, I hear it gets really horrible when you use it on very large partitions and I'd like this whole drive (300Gb) to be one partition. I'm not sure how much time I'll end up spending in Linux vs Windows so that won't really play into it. Captive aparently grabs the ntfs driver from windows and uses THAT from within a wine-ish framework. Oh well, I'll give this stuff a try later. I need a bigger hard drive regardless of what I do with the old one.

phrakture · 2005-04-18 21:31:56

SavageMessiah wrote:

Vfat may be a bit of an issue, I hear it gets really horrible when you use it on very large partitions and I'd like this whole drive (300Gb) to be one partition. I'm not sure how much time I'll end up spending in Linux vs Windows so that won't really play into it. Captive aparently grabs the ntfs driver from windows and uses THAT from within a wine-ish framework. Oh well, I'll give this stuff a try later. I need a bigger hard drive regardless of what I do with the old one.

I would suggest setting up multiple smaller partitions at first... maybe make one vfat, one ntfs, and one ext2 - try different ways of accessing both... stress test it out...

SavageMessiah · 2005-04-18 21:45:12

<rant>To be honest this whole "let's dual boot linux" thing will come to nothing like it always does for me. Usually my occasional extreme frustration with windows is made up for by the presence of certain insanely good utitlies (Autohotkey, litestep, Vern) that just don't exist on linux, and balanced by the fact that I often find linux just as annoying. (I recall a video I saw online - something like "All Oses Suck" or somesuch) That, compounded with that fact that I should just get a new - non-sucky mouse for my other computer and just rotate my chair 45 degrees to the right and use my goddamn linux computer instead of pissing and moaning about god only knows what is eating at me that day.</rant>

Heh, sorry to turn a reasonable question into a self-deprecating rant . Thanks for the links and such, it was more than I turned up on my own. Eventually I'll try the lot out and if I remember, I'll report my results here for interested parties.

phrakture · 2005-04-18 22:08:47

I apologize for the OT:
Messiah: could you possibly explain your litestep setup to me? It can be done in a PM, so as not to pollute this thread. I'm attempting to develop a linux based WM which is entirely modular, in the same vein as litestep. However, having not used litestep, I'm at a bit of a disadvantage. What I'd like to know:
What modules do you use? Can I see a screenshot? Do you use the !bang commands often? How do (functionally) use your setup?

Anyway, back on topic:
It takes people a bit to get far away from windows... at first when I was using gnome and kde I always thought "this is just as bad as windows" - but if you start to mess with other WMs, eventually you find one that "just fits" - for me that was WMI (WMII now)

iphitus · 2005-04-19 01:41:47

Well theres vfat.

Or theres captive ntfs. The captive dudes pretty much used wine around the windows NTFS driver, similar to ndiswrapper. From what i've heard, its pretty good.

rose · 2005-04-19 17:11:01

There was something like "UVFAT", but I don't know if it works with 2.6.x. It stored permissions in a separate file.

There are also some Windows drivers for (at least read-only) access to ext2/3 partitions. You can for example enable ro access for ext3 partition in Windows, and ro access for ntfs partition in linux.

sweiss · 2005-04-19 17:37:57

phrakture wrote:

incinerator wrote:
Alternatives would be using ntfs together with captive or using tools for Windows to access linux filesystems, I haven't got any links for that though.
I have something on my windows partition called.... totalcommander or something like that - it allows you to access linux partitions... I can't recall if it's free or if I have shareware.... *shrug* - haven't booted windows in about 6 months

It's shareware and works well at the time of need, also has support for reiserfs.

scarecrow · 2005-04-19 17:48:30

The Total Commander addon, mentioned above, works quite well (ext2/3 and ReiserFS 3.X), but it's read only. The plugin is opensource, and Total Commander uncrippled, never expiring shareware (the only limitation is a nagger at program startup).
Paragon makes some commercial cross platform solutions, namely Mount Everything (now at version 3.5) which supports read/write for ext2/3 under windows (not ReiserFS). It does have a few rough edges.
Under Linux, Paragon makes a read/write NTFS kernel driver, which supports 2.6.X kernels since the very last edition. I tried it under the new Mandriva 2005LE, and made it work with the normal 2.6.11 kernel. The I/O operations were horribly slow though, a tad slower than with Captive. Using a SMP enabled kernel, the driver failed to compile properly. Not tried it yet under Arch.
And finally there is the old captive-NTFS hack, which is rather reliable, provided that the partitions aren't larger than 128GB, and there are not active Windows 2000 ones. I/O operations are very slow here, as well.

Duke · 2005-04-21 15:05:50

Why not UDF?

scarecrow · 2005-04-21 16:15:38

Duke wrote:

Why not UDF?

Is UDF revision 2.50 suitable for harddisks? I strongly doubt it... previous UDF revisions surely weren't.

DarkPath · 2005-04-22 02:38:31

I've found a separate fat32 partition is helpful. I set up a folder in there specifically for my linux usage... so I just use it whenever I might need to read stuff from linux while I'm in Windows.

FYI - for those of you looking for a decent ext2/ext3 file explorer for windows: check out Explore2fs
Here an obligatory screenshot: http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/explor … enshot.gif

neri · 2005-04-22 08:52:46

DarkPath wrote:

I've found a separate fat32 partition is helpful. ...
FYI - for those of you looking for a decent ext2/ext3 file explorer for windows: check out Explore2fs
...

I just like to second that, the combination of writing to vfat from either side is
absolutely sufficient, since for those kinde of files you hardly need
permissions. And explore2fs is rather fast on reading ext2/3 so I can live
with it when I need to copy over bigger files. If you really need to copy things
often between the systems and also store them, so that they can be accesed
from either side, you likely end up with a seperate Linux box running a samba
server. Just my 2 Cent

-neri

PS. I found that all ntfs writing solutions are horribly slow compared with
vfat, explore2fs and even with samba on a 100Mbit network.

scarecrow · 2005-05-10 11:31:51

But then vfat has the four giga filesize limitation, which is rather critical for DVD images and video files...

Michel · 2005-05-10 22:55:59

Heya,

here are some links to windows-drivers/programs to read ext2, ...

ext2: http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/projects … tm#ext2fsd
ext2/ext3: http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm
reiserfs: http://yareg.akucom.de/
reiserfs: http://p-nand-q.com/download/rfstool.html

explore2fs has already been mentionned. Here is a link: http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

Hopes it helps a bit,

Howver, you cmaybe could check the linux-ntfs-driver and see if it works for you ... I have not tried it, but maybe it is usefull to check the current status of the driver.

Michel

oscar · 2005-05-11 08:36:46

If you have two computers you use (one for Linux and one for Windows, right?) - why not simply put your two biggest discs in your older computer, install some linux on it, and store all your files on it, and share 'em with samba and / or nfs?
Then you can dualboot on your faster computer and won't have to worry about filesystem driver compabilities in Windows / Linux...

iom · 2005-06-05 09:43:52

DarkPath wrote:

FYI - for those of you looking for a decent ext2/ext3 file explorer for windows: check out Explore2fs

just for the record. I used explore2s a couple of years ago. and - unfortunately - it _SCREWED_ all my data. the problem was - it did copy everything - even more than that: it copied a few bytes more. so all my files actually became bigger than they were on ext2. at the end explore2fs added a few bytes so that size was divisible by 2k or something [actual size on disk], i don't remember any more.

surely, it wasn't something horrible, a simple C program would do the trick - still. i won't use explore2fs again. ever.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-04-18 20:04:07

Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#2 2005-04-18 20:12:30

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#3 2005-04-18 20:17:31

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#4 2005-04-18 20:22:35

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#5 2005-04-18 20:25:30

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#6 2005-04-18 20:29:28

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#7 2005-04-18 20:40:23

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#8 2005-04-18 21:03:35

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#9 2005-04-18 21:04:24

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#10 2005-04-18 21:16:14

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#11 2005-04-18 21:31:56

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#12 2005-04-18 21:45:12

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#13 2005-04-18 22:08:47

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#14 2005-04-19 01:41:47

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#15 2005-04-19 17:11:01

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#16 2005-04-19 17:37:57

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#17 2005-04-19 17:48:30

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#18 2005-04-21 15:05:50

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#19 2005-04-21 16:15:38

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#20 2005-04-22 02:38:31

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#21 2005-04-22 08:52:46

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#22 2005-05-10 11:31:51

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#23 2005-05-10 22:55:59

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#24 2005-05-11 08:36:46

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

#25 2005-06-05 09:43:52

Re: Linux & Windows Compatible File System?

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