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

[Eric Dunbar]

On 04/02/07, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> Eric Dunbar wrote:
>
> > On 04/02/07, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> >> Eric Dunbar wrote:
> >> >
> >> > Or, as I discovered this evening, you can map a drive or a partition
> >> > to your VM and avoid messing with Samba (need to be running vmware as
> >> > root, however).
> >>
> >> How?  I googled some pages that said you could, but I couldn't figure it
> >> out.
> >
> > Edit the preferences for your VM (assuming you're using Server).
>
> Well, no.  Why would I be using Server when it's so simple to install
> Player...

That's your decision. This morning (7/2/7) someone posted a message
about VMware as well (unrelated to my threads) -- one of the links
there pointed to a page where someone was editing a VMware VM
configuration file manually to add a partition to the computer.

... but, if you have VMware it's easy as pie ;-) (perhaps the third
party VMware configuration software can set up partitions or drives to
be mounted by the VM).

PS One consideration re: VMware Player is that the EULA _supposedly_
(I haven't bothered to investigate) prohibits its use as a server.

> More and more, I think that the idea of "avoiding" Samba is a mistake.
> Using Samba, you get to use Linux native filesystems for sharing your data.

I'm trying to avoid relying on the VMware host system for _any_
services. I'd like to be able to move the VM from computer to computer
without having to worry about configuring _anything_ other than VMware
Server in _some_ OS (whether that OS is Ubuntu, CentOS, FC, Debian,
Windows XP, etc.).

> > hose my MBR (I think) by telling my Windows XP CD to 'fixmbr' and now
> > doing the "GRUB dance" with the live Cd to no avail (e.g.
>
> Bring up Live CD, open terminal:
>
> sudo mount /dev/... /mnt (where /dev/... is your Ubuntu partition)
> grub-install /dev/... --root-directory=/mnt/boot (or maybe that should only
> have been /mnt - I'm just doing it from memory.  /dev/... in this case is
> the drive whose mbr you want to write).

I've gotten further with my understanding of MBR (a good thing IMNSHO)
-- but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to configure GRUB to
get it to boot the Windows install.

Independently (with the Linux HD removed) the Windows install DOES
boot but gives a boot.ini error (it's actually missing -- and bootcfg
/rebuild refuses to complete, even after a successful chkdsk /r and a
'flawless' chkdsk /p... disk corruption, somewhere not fixable by
chkdsk?).

Either way, I think my conceptual understanding of Linux/Windows/GRUB
is now sufficiently advanced that I know what NOT to do and that I'm
prepared to start configuring the server and set things up (time to
wipe the disks ;-).
Eric