Sharing an external disk between Fedora and XP

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 04:34, Paul McGarry wrote:
> I just purchased a 200gig drive and external USB/Firewire casing that
> I'd like to share between my desktop/server (Fedora) and my laptop
> (Win XP).
> 
> Obviously XP doesn't understand ext2 (and the only 3rd party driver I
> have found is read only) and NTFS isn't fully supported on Linux.
> 
> Does anyone have any suggested solutions here?
> 
> I thought FAT32 might be the answer. However XP won't format a FAT32
> partition over 32 gig so that would mean a lot of silly little
> partitions. I understand that it should be able to access larger FAT32
> partitions but that it simply won't create them. (I get the impression
> that larger partitions might be inefficient in some way, anyone know
> if that is correct?). Is there a way to partition and format FAT32
> disks under linux?
> 
> Any other ideas? Otherwise I'll be stuck making it NTFS and having to
> use the laptop to transfer files from my desktop rather than using the
> disk directly.

VFAT should go to 120 gigs so you might want a small ext3 and NTFS
partition as well to cover cases where you need to preserve
OS-specific attributes for each system.   You'll lose any ownership
and permissions concepts on the VFAT partition.  Did you try
a 120 gig or smaller size?  You won't be able to go above that
in one partition but you shouldn't be stuck at 32M unless you
use the old 12-bit fat table.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com