[ale] Compatible filesystems between Windows and other systems (Was: Re: external hard drive)

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 01/27/2010 09:37 AM, Robert Coggins wrote:
> Speaking of drives, I just bought a 500 gig portable drive that I will
> be mostly using with linux and mac.  Sometimes I might connect it to a
> windows box.  What is the best file system to use so that the drive
> works between all three?  Right now it is vfat but I am limited to 4 gig
> files.  I would like to keep some virtuals on it...

Then use NTFS.  Ubuntu and other modern distributions have the NTFS-3G 
FUSE module available, which you can use for perfect compatibility with 
Windows systems.

The other option that you have is to put two partitions on the drive: 
one that is a small FAT16 partition (no more than 100 MB) that you can 
store filesystem drivers on, and then you can make the rest ext2 or ext3 
and use something like ext2fsd for it.  The "new" 64-bit FAT (exFAT) 
could also be used, if there is a Linux VFS driver for it, but I am not 
currently aware of one.

Also, Windows does know how to speak UDF.  I don't know if it will do 
UDF on a hard disk or a hard-disk like media (such as USB sticks), but 
it would be worth a shot.  If you can do that, UDF supports large files.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                    Blog: http://mike.trausch.us/blog/
Tel: (404) 592-5746 x1                            Email: mike at trausch.us