Sharing an external disk between Fedora and XP

[Kam Leo]

On Fri, 04 Feb 2005 08:02:03 -0600, Les Mikesell <les at futuresource.com> wrote:
> 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
> 

Create an extended partition and then create logical partitions within.