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

Felipe Alfaro Solana felipe.alfaro at gmail.com
Sun Feb 4 02:09:15 UTC 2007


On 2/4/07, Gabriel Dragffy <dragffy at yandex.ru> wrote:
> Hey!! I've got some experience of this myself. Essentially FAT sucks,
> really badly, only use it as a last resort. Getting NTFS read/write in
> linux is not easy, nor foolproof, but if you want it then you should be
> looking at NTFS 3G I think.
>
> Ext3, however, is fantastic under ubuntu and it works really really well
> under XP. Personally if I had XP installed then I would have a small
> data partition for XP system, everything else (userland) would be
> formatted ext3. the driver from http://www.fs-driver.org/ works like a
> charm.

Since Linux can read almost any filesystem on Earth (NTFS, VFAT, HPFS
and so), I would suggest choosing NTFS. On the other hand, NTFS sucks,
so I suggest the following crazy idea:

Use a "shared" partition formatted with a real, Linux-native
filesystem, like ext3 or XFS. When running Windows, also run a small
Linux guest on top of
QEMU/VMware/put-your-favorite-virtualization-software-here that
attaches to your shared partition and let it export the files in there
via SAMBA. Probably not the simplest solution but Windows is so
featureless (can only read VFAT and NTFS) and unstable (maybe the ext3
driver for Windows makes it crash) that it could make sense.




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