Living in a dual boot world?


Recommended Posts

I want to set my main box up to be a dual boot with Windows XP and Linux (not sure which yet, another story, another time). However, I'd like to be able to share files between the two OS's very easily. Right now I have two drives in my system; one 500Gb and another 60Gb.

The 60Gb will be for Linux only. It's currently used as the 'My Documents' drive, not having the need yet to span in to the remaining free space on the 500Gb drive.

The 500Gb drive current has one 10Gb NTFS partition for Windows, and another 40Gb NTFS partition for installed applications. Of the left over 450Gb-ish, I'd like to turn in to the new 'my documents' (music, images, etc) partition. However, I'd like this block of space to be read/write-able for both Windows and Linux. I was thinking FAT32, but I know there is a max partition size limitation that'll keep me from having a 450Gb fat 32 drive.

So this brings me to my question, any advice on how I should set this up? I'd really like to share my media and documents easily between the two installs. All the while keep the total number of partitions on my system to a minimum. I'm also slightly OCD, so organizational things like this can drive me mad if I don't get them done in a satisfactory manner! Help keep me from going nuts :-o

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The windows formatting utility imposes the 32gb limit on FAT32 partitions, there are third party apps out there that will correctly format >32gb. Not sure if the limit is 127gb though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, I was reading about doing that with Ranish Partition Manager, but there are a number of posts that bring up the 12xgb cap.

It's looking more and more like I'll have to do 4 11xgb partitions. I'm open to any other ideas from the folks that have large drive setups with Linux and Windows though...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No need to format in FAT32, as Linux can no read and write to NTFS.....Im dual booting Ubuntu and XP SP3, used google to find the NTFS addon, downloaded, installed and configured it and can no read from and write to NTFS partitions.

GE

Link to comment
Share on other sites

^^^ I think he means "Linux can now read and write to NTFS"

And, yes, for shared media, I hear NTFS is just fine. Certainly beats setting up four separate partitions, and also dealing with the FAT 4GB file size limit (if you have video media, this will become a major issue).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

what I did was partition my raptor (75gb for windows, 75gb for ubuntu), install windows, setup everything you need to do. Then install linux and let the GRUB bootloader work its magic. Then go to Synaptic Package manager and search for NTFS, install, and your done. I also have a 2nd drive (250gb) that I share between azureus/utorrent.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Mine was set up, 40 gig ntfs for Vista, 40 gig ext3 for Linux and 212 gig ntfs for "stuff" and 7 gig ntfs for Recovery, and Ubuntu read and wrote to all partitions right out of the box.

If you are going to use Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Xubuntu, use Wubi to install a *buntu to your windows partition and give it a test run. Easy to install or remove and no formatting is required.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

what I did was partition my raptor (75gb for windows, 75gb for ubuntu)...

By that, I hope you mean that you left 75GB unpartitioned for Ubuntu.

Things work so much easier if you just leave unpartitioned space, and let the Linux installer see and use that automatically, without you needing to configure or set up anything.

*wubi is excluded from my consideration, since I lack any experience with installing Ubuntu onto an NTFS filesystem. I hear it works nice, though, and it does offer some advantages to those that are likely to not keep Linux installed. Not sure how much I would recommend having Linux write to the same NTFS partition that its wubi file exists on - I would be concerned about conflicts and errors until I saw some further detail on this particular setup.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Ubuntu works so well with NTFS that I was able to download that ext2/ext3 utility (been looking for this functionality so thank you btw) and save it directly to my Vista x64 desktop.

As long as you aren't locking down folders/files in NTFS then Ubuntu should pick up everything by default (at least as of 8.04). After that it's just a matter of going into your Places menu and accessing the media. (from there it'll do the authentication thing and you're off)

I have a single drive in my laptop which I've simply partitioned out into; 20gb for Windows, 15gb for Linux, 2-3gb for swap, and the rest is all lumped into a wide-open NTFS partition which I install and save all of my important data to. That way when I start mucking around with sudo commands or Windows system files I only lose an OS install rather than my pictures and music and games and documents and grandma's recipes and so forth.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's pretty straightforward with Ubuntu, you can also tweak GRUB to time out faster and set Windows as the default choice when starting up if you want. Ubuntu is always good to have, it has saved me numerous times from fatal mistakes I've done on Windows XP. Make sure Windows is a FAT32 or I don't think you'll be able to write to the drive if its NTFS (I'm not sure about more modern releases).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.