If this isn’t on topic, sorry ahead of time & perhaps you can point me in the right place?
I’ve been reading up on having a separate partition for your /home files. For quite some time, I’ve been using a ntfs partition named “storage” as it makes re-install or fresh install of OS much easier. While it’s WAAAAAY neat that two different distros of Linux can share the /home partition, I still need MS at times. I figure I can’t be the only one, but after looking on the net, I couldn’t decide the best way. I could use Linux to pull files off of the MS XP ntfs partition easy enough, but it seems cheesy. All the options to allow XP to see the Linux partition have permission issues as well as hidden extensions that can’t be hidden. Dangerous trumps cheesy. It would seem grabbing what I need in XP partition from within Linux is the answer… is there something I’ve overlooked? I’m gunna get into virtualization at some point, but I’m just not ready to nuke XP, there are times it’s the only thing I can get to work (like my Netbook internal 3G)
On 06/15/2010 11:13 PM, ABSDoug wrote: > can point me in the right place? > named “storage” as it makes re-install or fresh install of OS > much easier. While it’s WAAAAAY neat that two different distros > of Linux can share the /home partition, I still need MS at times.
As do many of us.
> I figure I can’t be the only one, but after looking on the net, > I couldn’t decide the best way.
To do what, exactly? Access files or triple boot?
> off of the MS XP ntfs partition easy enough, but it seems cheesy.
What’s so cheesy about it?
> All the options to allow XP to see the Linux partition have > permission issues as well as hidden extensions that can’t be hidden. > Dangerous trumps cheesy. It would seem grabbing what I need in > XP partition from within Linux is the answer… is there something > I’ve overlooked?
Not unless there’s something you aren’t telling us. Like how your Subject doesn’t seem to match the contents of your post.
> but I’m just not ready to nuke XP, there are times it’s the only > thing I can get to work (like my Netbook internal 3G)
Triple booting and creating a /home partition are orthogonal tasks.
No sane person would. If you *do* treat “storage” as /home, then You’re Doing It Wrong.
What you do a bad job of is using Yahoo, somehow blasting the thread model, and not word wrapping. I lay most of the blame on Yahoo.
why do you need to access the /home partition when using winxp? ntfs doesn’t support POXIS file ownership and permissions natively. so keep you /home partition to a linux filesystem. you can have a separate storage partition for shared documents and files, mount it to the /home hierarchy or somewhere else, and access it with each of your installed os.
btw, what’s keeping you from moving your winxp into virtualization?
Regards, Tao
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 09:13:11PM -0700, ABSDoug wrote: For virtualization, check out virtualbox-ose. It will run Windows XP just fine from your Debian system. Backports.org has a much newer version than what is in the standard Lenny repositories.
There are Windows drivers available to access ext2 partitions (and maybe ext3 partitions), but I have never used them. I only know they exist.
For my parents, who dual boot XP and Ubuntu, I set up a separate FAT32 partition. It is readable/writable by both Windows and Linux.
Accessing an NTFS drive from Linux seems pretty safe these days, even if most of the drivers for doing so are loaded with caution statements.
My preference is to not let /home be writable by Windows. Windows is likely to get malware, so I’d rather limit what it can access in terms of my files.
-Rob
On 06/16/2010 07:10 PM, ABSDoug wrote: [snip]
Symlink the NTFS iTunes directory to some place under $HOME.
On 06/16/2010 07:16 PM, ABSDoug wrote: [snip]
Gmail doesn’t seem to suffer the non-wrapping problem.
i didn’t notice that you are not familiar with the symbolic link solution. actually, it’s the simplest way. i should have mentioned it in the first place.
$ man ln
and you’ll have a rough idea about it.
let’s say you winxp “C:” partition is mounted to “/media/xp” . and the iTunes dir being sth like “c:document and settingsuser…iTunes” . to link it to somewhere under home, you do
$ ln -s “/media/xp/document and settingsuser…iTunes” “$HOME/path/to/your/destination”
such links are frequently used to share config files.
you can make symlinks between files or dirs. be careful about the trailing slash. it’s the same set of rules with mv and cp.
there’s also a “–bind / –move” option for mount (check out the man page) but symbolic links are totally enough for your case.
Tao
Yep.
If this is a single-user system it should be enough to have all the shared data on the NTFS partition and have a line like this in fstab:
LABEL=storage /home/abs/storage ntfs-3g uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=113,dmask=002,users 0
(labels are safer than device names and I assumed abs is your username)
The uid= and gid= parameters should match your uid and gid. Use ‘id’ to find them out (most probably 1000). Also make sure you install the package ntfs-3g. For the other parameters see ‘man mount’.
Regards, Andrei