Sharing an external disk between Fedora and XP

[Paul Howarth]

Paul McGarry wrote:
> I just purchased a 200gig drive and external USB/Firewire casing that
> I'd like to share between my desktop/server (Fedora) and my laptop
> (Win XP).
> 
> Obviously XP doesn't understand ext2 (and the only 3rd party driver I
> have found is read only) and NTFS isn't fully supported on Linux.
> 
> Does anyone have any suggested solutions here?
> 
> I thought FAT32 might be the answer. However XP won't format a FAT32
> partition over 32 gig so that would mean a lot of silly little
> partitions. I understand that it should be able to access larger FAT32
> partitions but that it simply won't create them. (I get the impression
> that larger partitions might be inefficient in some way, anyone know
> if that is correct?). Is there a way to partition and format FAT32
> disks under linux?
> 
> Any other ideas? Otherwise I'll be stuck making it NTFS and having to
> use the laptop to transfer files from my desktop rather than using the
> disk directly.

You could try making the partition in Linux using fdisk (set the 
partition type to "b" or "c") and then formatting it using mkdosfs.

The inefficiency in large FAT partitions is due to there being a limited 
number of "clusters" that a partition can be split into for the purposes 
of allocation of disk space to files. The bigger the partition, the 
bigger the cluster size. If you have a large cluster size, small files 
will be stored inefficiently, because the minimum amount of space the 
file can take on the disk is a single cluster. If you're storing things 
like MP3s, this is not likely to be a big issue for you.

Paul.