File System for USB Disk?

Phil Schaffner Philip.R.Schaffner at NASA.GOV
Tue Aug 2 14:20:25 UTC 2005


On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 08:31 -0400, James Pifer wrote:
> I have 160 gig hard disk installed in a USB 2 enclosure.
> 
> What is the best file system to put on it?
> 
> It would be nice to be able to plug it into both Linux and Windows
> machines. Obviously NTFS is not an option.

Possibly with captive, as mentioned elsewhere.  Have not tried it myself
- I only use the read-only kernel module for NTFS.

> Windows can't read linux drives.

Well, that's not quite true.  Google "windows ext3"...

http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/ext2.html

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm

> So what does that leave me with?
> 
> Linux is my primary choice, so I put ext3 on it using qtparted. 
> 
> When I plug it into my laptop, the light on the usb enclosure flashes,
> but I don't see anything under /media. Is there any way to force a
> refresh? /etc/fstab has this:
> /dev/sdb1               /media/usbdisk          ext3   
> pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
> 
> Once I get that working, how do I deal with permissions since my userid
> will not be able to write to it? Should I give my userid ownership of
> /media/usbdisk? Will those permissions "stick" when I remove and plug
> the drive in again?

If using ext3, should be able to deal with permissions like any other
filesystem.  If using VFAT, then mounting as a user makes everything
owned as that user if the fstab entries and /media/* are automagically
created correctly as they are for my external USB/FireWire VFAT disks
and USB keys.  Not sure why your experience differs, but then USB
support has always been a bit problematic.

Phil





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