[SOLVED]Reconsidering Lin/Win shared partition strategy

Havin_it · Last edited by Havin_it on Tue Jul 17, 2007 1:26 pm; edited 1 time in total

Hello,

I recently switched from KLaptopdaemon to KPowersave, and one of the most impressive changes I noticed was that I now have a seriously fast suspend-to-disk function (much faster than using hibernate-script and swsusp in gentoo-sources). That's great, but unfortunately all my documents and Mozilla profile stuff are on a FAT32 partition that I share with my Windows install. Windows filesystems have to be unmounted before hibernate (in this implementation), so that typically means closing down Quanta, Firefox and Thunderbird for me.

I've never been all that happy about using FAT for this partition, as I understand it's inefficient and can wear-down a single area of your disk. I hardly use Windows these days, but when I do I need to have reliable write-access to that partition. As I see it, I have the following options:

1) Reformat as Ext2 and use Ext2fsd from the Win side. (What are the differences between Ext2/Ext3?)

2) Reformat as Ext3 and enable Ext2fsd's "not production quality" Ext3 write support (Anyone have experience with this?)

3) Find another filesystem that's well supported on both sides (not heard of such a thing besides FAT, anything new?)

Just to give an idea of what lives in this partition, there's all my Firefox/Tbird profile stuff (including mail dirs), a dir full of website stuff (about 2000 small files) and a 3GB disk-image used for virtualisation.

Besides the questions in parentheses above, any experienced commentary/advice is very welcome. Is there a solution that ticks all the boxes? Or am I better just sticking with FAT32? Thanks in advance =)

Naib · Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 12:00 pm Post subject:

4) make a basic NIS
I never trust another OS to write to the other (Linux --> NTFS, Windows to Ext2/3) and for a long time use to just READ the other system.

Got a NSLU2 for like £50 and an USB drive and life became soo much simpler! Upgraded to a EPIA-based system now since was after more then a NIS
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#define Int main()
#define Return printf
#define Print return
#include <stdio>
HelloWorld Int {
Return("Hello, world!\n");
Print 0;

Havin_it · Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 12:04 pm Post subject:

Um, can you translate your acronyms? I'm thick :oops:

and didn't get any of that apart from "USB drive".

EDIT: OK, got off my lazy bum and googled them. Not sure if I got the right result for EPIA, is it a type of motherboard? The (Linksys) NSLU2 sounds nice (more hackable hardware after the WRT54 router eh?) but I already have a server, so that's not really my issue. I can't be net-connected all the time, and I really want to be able to work on my core set of files from both sides. I feel the Windows end should have less priority since it'll be used less than 1% of the time, but it still needs to work.

LoSeR_5150 · Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 12:03 am Post subject:

I share my data from my windows partition with my linux partition using ntfs3g. All my music/videos/pictures are on my windows partition (ntfs) and I just mount it up using ntfs-3g and it works great. I'm not sure if it is 'production' ready or what not, but i've never had a single problem. I do regular backups so If i hose my one or both partitions I wont lose anything, well except the time to re-install/re-compile everything.
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Havin_it · Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2007 1:25 pm Post subject:

About time I updated this. I decided to go for Op 2: Ext2, using Ext2FSD on the Windows side. I made an effort to spend more time using Windows (boring) and no problems yet; the ext2fsd volume manager was even perfectly happy with an Ext2 filesystem inside a TrueCrypt volume, though I haven't tested that much yet.

I just feel a lot better not being saddled with FAT and all its weirdness. I update regularly, so even the possibility of corruption doesn't scare me too much. I'll be sticking with this strategy for the forseeable, but will post back if I have any problems.

blacksadness · n00b Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 19 Location: Lebanon

i see the issue solved, but just for the record,
i used to have that solution previously though i didn't have a shared ff directory between the 2 os, what i had problems with were the filenames with Unicode chars, (arabic to be precise) my current solution is to install windows in a virtual machine and do all my browsing in linux

and i haven't got into any trouble yet (it's been almost a year) ..
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