[TriLUG] dual boot and partition access

Carl Crider c.crider at gmail.com
Wed Mar 30 11:36:23 EDT 2011


On my dual-boot laptop, I use a 100GB NTFS partition for file-sharing
between OS's (Mint & Win7).
The drive (/share) is auto-mounted when Linux boots. I used to share the
Windoze My Documents
directory within my Linux /home directory; but a weird crash back in January
made me change
my ways.






On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 9:00 AM, Kevin Hunter <hunteke at earlham.edu> wrote:

> At 10:18pm -0400 Tue, 29 Mar 2011, Michael Rulison wrote:
>
>> Imagine:
>> partition 1 ubuntu / root; /home/user; and all the rest -- but with v.
>> little of my own in /home/user [bootable]
>> partition 2 ubuntu /linux-home --- where I have copied the above
>> /home/user and have lots of my own files.
>> partition 3 winXP with lots of pgms and data files. [bootable]
>>
>
> It may be more helpful to talk in conceptual terms of 'partitions',
> 'filesystems', and 'mount points'.  First, there's the physical bits layout,
> or partitions.  Lets assume you have a 100GiB HDD, partitioned thus:
>
> part1  10 GiB
> part2  40 GiB
> part3  50 GiB
>
> This partitioning scheme does not yet give a notion of OS usage or
> filesystem formatting.
>
> The second concept of a filesystem says what scheme you'd like to use to
> keep the data bits organized and usable on each partition.  For both
> operating systems to be able to utilize a filesystem (which you currently
> happen to be housing on a partition), they'll both need to have a driver
> that understands the filesystem in question.
>
> As an example, since both Windows and Linux have drivers for the fat32
> filesystem, you /could/ format each of the above as:
>
> part1  (10 GiB)  fat32
> part2  (40 GiB)  fat32
> part3  (50 GiB)  fat32
>
> Then both operating systems could read all three filesystems.  However, the
> more likely filesystem scheme might be something like below, noting that
> unless you were to install a program or driver in Windows, it will not be
> able to read the filesystem on part1.[1]
>
> part1  (10 GiB)  ext4
> part2  (40 GiB)  fat32
> part3  (50 GiB)  ntfs
>
> Finally, at the point you actually boot one of the operating systems, the
> decision of what to mount where is almost completely arbitrary.  The scheme
> that you have described, of mounting a separate HDD partition to /home is a
> very common scheme, and should work just fine.  So, with the use of the
> ntfs-3g drivers in Linux, you could mount each of the partitions to /,
> /home, and /windows:
>
> part1  (10 GiB)  ext4   /
> part2  (40 GiB)  fat32  /home
> part3  (50 GiB)  ntfs   /windows
>
> Your Linux install will transparently use part2's filesystem as /home, and
> will transparently let you use /windows.  You'll be none-the-wiser unless
> you were use 'df -hs'.  Windows, on the other hand, short of [1] below, will
> only see part1 as dead space on your HDD, and probably mount part2 as D:.
>  (I'm not a Windows person, so YMMV.)
>
>
>  Question: If I 'move' my ubuntu /home over to /linux-home (as the
>> partition is registered) and make it my ubuntu /home directory
>> (really), will WinXP still be able to 'see', read/write to
>> /linux-home partition as it currently can?
>>
>
> To actually answer your question: as long as you do *not* use a filesystem
> for which Windows does not have a driver, Windows will see no change.  Or,
> put differently, if Windows can read/write to it now, and since you're
> /only/ changing information in /etc on part1, Windows should have no clue
> that you've done anything, short of random files that will appear and
> disappear between Windows boots as you add and delete them while in Ubuntu.
>
> HTH,
>
> Kevin
>
> [1] http://www.howtoforge.com/access-linux-partitions-from-windows
>
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