Sharing files between Ubuntu 6.06 and Windows XP Pro - best disk format to use

Roby electricalsciences at adelphia.net
Sun Feb 4 00:19:27 UTC 2007


Duncan Lithgow wrote:

> On Sat, 2007-02-03 at 06:02 -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
>> Hi, another question:
>> 
>> I'd like to share files for read-write access between Windows XP and
>> Ubuntu 6.06. To be specific, I'd like to share two partitions: 1. a VM
>> (virtual machine for VMware); and, 2. files to be served up by apache
>> and smbd in that VM.
>> 
>> What is the best disk format to use? FAT, NTFS, ext3?
> FAT: Reliable, proven to work. But not the greatest on-disk filesystem.
> NTFS: Reportedly stable, supported by some kernels (not sure if Ubuntu
> 6.06 supports it). Support for read/write from linux is newer and
> theoretically therefore less dependable. But I haven't heard much about
> it.
> EXT3: Will only work if you install a special file browser in windows.
> 
> So, go to wikipedia and other places, do some homework and take your
> pick - they're all possible.
> 
> Most people use FAT32 for this purpose.
> 
> Duncan
> 
I installed an ext3 driver on my win2k (sp4) install, giving me full
read/write access to my ext3 partitions from win2k.  No special file 
browser was needed. The driver is available as Ext2IFS_1_10c.exe.

On the linux side, I use the ntfs-3g driver to gain read/write access
to the ntfs partition where win2k lives.

I still have a couple of fat32 partitions as shared space, but only
because I haven't taken the time to tar the contents, convert to ext3,
and untar the stuff back.  So far, no problems with either driver.





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