<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#333399"> Very helpful stuff.  Thank you.  I will get to work using your advice. Interesting though.  The PC I am using was given to me by a friend.  He retained his HDD - presumably a SATA drive.  I however, installed my drive which is an IDE.  It all works okay, but ii do get an error message on boot up about missing SATA drives but it then goes on and behaves normally - whatever that is?  I guess I should get a SATA drive?  Or is this just a configuration issue? Dave Christopher Lees wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:1203039831.6419.15.camel@chris-desktop" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 12:00 +0000, The Wassermans wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Message: 1 Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:06:54 +1100 From: The Wassermans <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:dwass@optusnet.com.au"><dwass@optusnet.com.au></a> Subject: Flying gParted To: <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com">"ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com"</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com"><ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com></a> Message-ID: <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:47B3861E.3040407@optusnet.com.au"><47B3861E.3040407@optusnet.com.au></a> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Trying to fly gParted without success. Please: 1. Interpret the partition information in the attached file. 2. Do I already have a free partition that I can adapt to pool data files created and accessible to Ubuntu and Windows, as the case may be. What steps from here to achieve that? 3 Is there a better product to use for partitioning? Dave W </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> Hi Dave, The information attached shows a SATA hard drive partitioned into two Linux ext3 partitions, one Windows NTFS partition, and seemingly two swap partitions. Ubuntu can read and write NTFS partitions, so you could just use your big NTFS partition for that. It is already accessible to you under /media/disk-2. The read/write speeds won't be too impressive, but it will work safely. One of your ext3 partitions is already mounted at /media/disk-1. I imagine this is the partition that you really want to use as a dedicated Windows-Linux data pool. If so, (I haven't used Gparted in ages) right-click /dev/sda2 and you'll see some kind of option to change the partition to "Fat32". This is the most common filesystem format to use to transfer data between Windows and any other operating system. The speeds will be good, but remember that Fat32 has a filesize limit of 4 gigabytes! This operation will destroy all data on /dev/sda2 (the drive that is mounted at /media/disk-1) so copy all information off that drive first onto a different partition or a DVD, before changing the filesystem format. The final option is to install an Ext2 / Ext3 filesystem driver for Windows so you can access the /dev/sda2 or /dev/sda4 (root) filesystem from within Windows. Due to the fact that Linux supports lots of special characters in filenames and Windows doesn't, you'll find that some files on your Ubuntu partition cannot be accessed on Windows. There are also security implications - an attacker who has compromised the Windows side of your computer can easily install a rootkit or something into the mounted Ubuntu partition. Frankly, your best option is to access the NTFS partition from within Ubuntu. Everything should already be set up for that; if you can't get write access you will need to change the permissions of /media/disk-2 so that you have read/write access. </pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>