Linux & Win XP Shared file system (dual boot)

[Gerard V]

I'm planning to install a linux distro on my XP Pro machine and to experiment with using linux for much of what I do at present. The machine in question has 960Gb of disk as three 320Gb SATA drives, and I want two (D: & E:) of those to be available for full read and write access regardless of which OS is booted.

I am looking for experience and opinion as whether to format the drives as ext2fs and install the ext2 drivers in XP, or to leave them as NTFS and use the linux NTFS drivers. Or something else. My main criteria is reliability/stability without compromising speed too much.

Any thoughts or opinions gratefully received.

[Blue_MiSfit]

NTFS on Linux works fine, but is slow. IIRC, EXT2/3 on Windows is more robust.

Just my 2 cents.

~MiSfit

[Henrikx]

@Gerard V
Try PC LINUX OS ! Super user-friendly!!
Linux NTFS drivers works very well!
I would format with EXT3 or Reiser.

http://www.mypclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=17

[shakey]

Normally I'd use a FAT32 partition as shared.

Recently though ntfs-tools has come out of beta. Using this NTFS filesystems can be written and read safely and quickly from linux :)

Not bad to say linux NTFS drivers are completely reverse engineered. :)

BTW, Ubuntu linux comes with ntfs-tools as standard.

[Gerard V]

Anyone know if the windows ext2fs drivers are ny good, speed wise? Faster or slower byte for byte than linux NTFS?

[Henrikx]

@Gerard V
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2007/03/mount-ext2-or-ext3-partition-in-windows.html

[Gerard V]

@henrikx - Thak you, that is a useful blog. I think I'll try accessing Ext2 FS from within Win XP to start with. I'm planning to try Ubuntustudio

[MetalheadGautham]

You can alwys choose fat32 like me, who chose to be stuck with something natively supported by both.

and I recomend ext3/4 too.

[Gerard V]

FAT32 doesn't do it for me. Mostly (99%) of my video work is to make souvenir DVDs of my stage hypnosis shows for the volunteers. We video each half of the show on a DV tape. Although the camera is HDV, we usually capture as PAL to the PC. Each capture is 10-18Gb in size, and FAT32 has a 4Gb file size limit. We use Vitrualdub to preview material and edits, and use Avisynth to cut, edit, add titles and credits, Tmpgenc to make m2v files, and DVD Lab Pro to author the DVD. Most of the intermediate work is on large files, and the DVD iso image is 4.5Gb or so. FAT is a waste of time.

It gets even more complicated when we splice shots from two cameras (avisynth again) and even more so if we capture the HDV and crop out or resize PAL frames (very rare - takes too long), but these files are > 100Gb. I'm hoping to use Linux to play with Cinelerra etc. and see what I can make easier that way. But DVD lab pro is no good on wine yet, and there's avisynth too. Hence the dual boot and shared partitions.

This is all part of a 3 - 4 year plan to drift away from Win XP over to Mac and Linux before I am forced to go to Vista. Although other options may show up later, I'm working on that scheme now and hope that Avisynth 3.0 for Linux matures enough in that time. I learned avisynth first and cannot imagine doing anything with video without it.

[celtic_druid]

Could also try: http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/

[Blue_MiSfit]

Gerard V:
HDV shouldn't be any bigger than DV. I have heard that it can be somewhat larger, but not significantly. So you should capture the HDV as HDV :)

~MiSfit