Share partition

[Alanado]

I am configuring RH7.2 with Win2k dual boot.
And I want know is there any way for me to create a shared partition so that both RH and Win2k can share to use same doc.

[Eugen Cocalea]

Hi,

It's fairly easy, just mount a win2k partition in linux and there you go. Anyway, this can be a little tricky if you have no knowledge of Linux, because it may need to recompile your Linux kernel to support ntfs or the file system that w2k uses.

E.

[Marcin Golembski_1]

If your w2k filesystem is ntfs then I would not recommend mounting it in linux, unless read-only. Writing to ntfs from linux is still experimental and hazardous... So I'd create a fat32 partition. It will be immediately available in w2k and mountable in RH.

If your w2k filesystem is fat32 you can mount it directly in linux (I don't thik you'll need to recompile the kernel, fat is instantly available in virtually all linux distributions, including RH).

The command to mount the fat32 partition is:

mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /fat

where you have to replace hda1 device file name with your w2k (if it's fat32) or the newly created fat32 partition's device file name, and /fat is a directory in linux where you want to have the partitin mounted.

HTH,
Marcin

[Santosh Nair_1]

As Marchin already mentioned, FAT32 (and for that matter FAT16, ala DOS) partions are mountable under Linux. You can also mount NTFS partition, but right now, you can only mount it read-only...the write portion of the kernel is still experimental.

Going the other way, you can read a ext2 partion from Windows (NT/2000) using explore2fs (http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm) Hope this helps.

-Santosh

[Lindsay Hill]

I have exactly that setup - RH7.2 and Win2K dual boot.

As the others have mentioned, you are probably best to do what I do - have a small FAT(32) partition, that both OSes can write to.

The problem is that you can read NTFS from Linux quite happily, although you do need to recompile a stock RH kernel. You can also read ext2 from Win2K using explore2fs. Neither will write to the other though, which can be very frustrating.

On a side note, anyone know why the ntfs module is not included in the default RH compiled kernel? After all, they include modules for all manner of weird FSes - minix, hfs, ufs, etc. Take a look at /lib/modules//kernel/fs one day. If they can include all those, why is it so hard to include ntfs?

This makes it extremely frustrating if you don't have the kernel source on your ext3 partition, instead you downloaded to your ntfs partition. If you don't have the fat32 partition, you can be in a difficult position.

Lindsay