On Wednesday 14 January 2009, Adam wrote:
> Matthias Johnson wrote:
> > - Thanks for the pointer, Chris! I did some research online, and
> > it looks like FAT32
> > - can handle partitions up to 4 TB. Windows can't /create/
> > partitions over 32 GB,
> > - but it can use them without problems. It just means I'll have
> > to use some
> > - third-party software to create it
> >
> > But you will have another issue which is files cannot be larger
> > than 4 Gig which stops
> > your ability to save backups of DVDs or anything else you have
> > that is large. Even if
> > you don't have anything now that large it will be a real pain
> > later on if you do.
>
> Ooh, I forgot about that -- thanks so much for reminding me! Yes,
> that will be a problem. because files > 4G are certainly possible,
> especially if I use 'tar' to combine files into an archive.
Right.
> So I'm making progress. Looks like I either have to find a way to
> write to an NTFS partition under Linux, or to read a Linux
> partition on a Windows (and preferably Mac) system.
ntfs-3g works very well for dealing with NTFS partitions -- EXCEPT
that without several manual changes you cannot mount an NTFS
partition as a normal user. More explanation:
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#unprivileged
However, once you mount as root you can use the mounted partition as a
normal user -- for both read + write. Mainly you just need to
remember to use 'mount -t ntfs-3g' instead of 'mount -t ntfs'.
> My "disaster scenario" is that I have to connect this USB HD to
> some other system to retrieve data from the backup partition, and I
> don't know in advance what kind of system that will be. I figure
> one can never have too many backup plans! Thanks again, everyone,
> for sharing your knowledge!
ntfs-3g now ships on many LiveCDs such as Knoppix, so it's workable
for the disaster scenario also. The one caviat is if you end up
needing to do the recovery using an older PowerPC-based Mac, which
might be a little more difficult to find an appropriate LiveCD for.
I'm guessing that the issue you might be running into with ext2-IFS
might be "Inodes that are larger than 128 bytes are not supported"
which is listed in the FAQ.
http://www.fs-driver.org/faq.html#not_sup_feat
Later versions of at least some Linux distrubtions seem to default to
256 bytes-per-inode, so that's probably what's going on. You can
manually set this during filesystem creation with 'mkfs.ext3 -i 128'
to see if that fixes the problem and allows you to mount the
filesystems with Windows again.
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
Jan 7 - Ruby on Rails
Feb 4 - TBD
