Drive Partitioning - shared with M$ Win2K

[OzDog]

The scenario -

Have a 20Gb Primary disk, 2 Partitions of 10Gb each. One Windows, the other Linux. ALL OK.

Have a new 80Gb Drive for data only. I want to create a single partition and share all data between 2 OSs (with read & write ability for both). I have realized, however that FAT-32 will only let me go to 30Gb maximum.

The only solution I can see is to create 3 separate partitions, spread the data logically (eg Music on one, Movies on another, misc data on 3rd) mount them all as "Movies", "Music" and "Data" and lose all the flexibility I was hoping for. (As I have ~35Gb of music, 30Gb will be far from ideal, but anway... :-( )

Can anyone give me an alternative to this? (No, a full Linux or WinK system is not practical, so please don't start an OS war). Cheers,
Sam

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[tanderso]

Vfat should let you do the full 80G. I've never heard of a 30G cap. What partitioner are you using? Try the Mandrake partitioner... just burn the first CD ISO and you can partition before you install anything.

Alternatively, you could do NTFS and only write in Win2k, but read in both. Maybe in that case you could create a 10G temp partition and a 70G main partition, so that you can write stuff to temp in linux and then copy it permanently to the NTFS portion whenever you load Windoze.

Third option is to install VMWare and load Windoze in a virtual machine window while running linux. Then you can make the full 80G NTFS and access it via your VMWare terminal.

Why is a full linux system not practical?
Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.

http://www.oac-design.com

 

[arjagadish]

Well as said by Tom Anderson, I have no where read or seen this 30GB restriction. I have formatted zillion Hard Disks with 40Gb partitions.

Sam, the only answer for u is vfat.......... doing which u can access the drive from both OS.... Linux and Windows.............. that's the easiest way.

 

[OzDog]

Thanks Guys.

Firstly, Tom - I am an NT4/Win2K/Citrix Systems Administrator, and need Windows.
Secondly, as I said originally I need to read & write to & from both OSs.

I found that the limit with FAT-32 is (theoretically) 8TB, but Win2K can only format to 30Gb for some reason.

Good Ole M$. Cheers,
Sam

Please let members know if you found their posts helpful.

 

[tanderso]

Like I suggested before, try burning the first Mandrake ISO, and use the Harddrake disk partitioner to create a vfat partition of the size you require. Win2k ought to be able to read and write to it just fine. You don't actually need to install Mandrake to use the partitioner (though it wouldn't be a terrible idea!)
Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.

http://www.oac-design.com

 

[smah]

You could also format it to full capacity with a win98 boot disk if you'd like. The 32 GB limit is true when formatting a fat32 partition with Win 2K or XP for whatever reason. This is only a limitation when formatting, once formatted you can read and write to the entire 80 GB.

 

[krale]

OzDog, there's a simple way around this problem. Create it through Linux.

1:Hook up the drive to the chain and then boot to Linux.
2:know which drive it is called (/dev/hd?)
3:fdisk /dev/hd?
(done within fdisk)
4: add a partition (primary, 1) using n and then change the type of the partition by using command l and hex code c
(exit AND SAVE fdisk by pressing w)
5:Now you can create the File system by /sbin/mkfs.vfat /dev/hd?1 That should create the file system on that partition.
6:Now you fsck it by /sbin/fsck.vfat /dev/hd?1 to check the disk.
7: Now you can mount it as normal.


One last note: MS intentionally set the liimit of Vfatformatting so that you would have to use NTFS-and you see the problems writing to ntfs in linux ;-) If you dont believe me, go compile the kernbel with write support in it.