File System for USB Disk?

[Bob Chiodini]

On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 09:03 -0400, James Pifer wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 08:31, James Pifer wrote:
> > I have 160 gig hard disk installed in a USB 2 enclosure.
> > 
> > What is the best file system to put on it?
> > 
> > It would be nice to be able to plug it into both Linux and Windows
> > machines. Obviously NTFS is not an option. Windows can't read linux
> > drives. So what does that leave me with?
> > 
> > Linux is my primary choice, so I put ext3 on it using qtparted. 
> > 
> > When I plug it into my laptop, the light on the usb enclosure flashes,
> > but I don't see anything under /media. Is there any way to force a
> > refresh? /etc/fstab has this:
> > /dev/sdb1               /media/usbdisk          ext3   
> > pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
> > 
> > Once I get that working, how do I deal with permissions since my userid
> > will not be able to write to it? Should I give my userid ownership of
> > /media/usbdisk? Will those permissions "stick" when I remove and plug
> > the drive in again?
> > 
> 
> Got some of it working. /media/usbdisk wasn't there so I created it and
> gave my userid permissions. Now when I plug in the drive I get the
> Removable Device icon on the desktop and I can open it, read/write, etc.
> Still looking for suggestions on the file system if anyone has one. 
> 
> Thanks,
> James
> 

James,

Vfat, I think, is your only choice for both windows and Linux.

We have a USB/Firewire drive here and I found that using vfat is the
easiest way.  There appears to be a 2 GB file size limitation for vfat.
To get around this, I formatted mine as ext3 and shared it via samba.
While not a portable solution it works in the office.

Bob...