Co-locating FC4 and XP - advice sought

[Antonio Olivares]

--- Steffen Kluge <kluge at fujitsu.com.au> wrote:

> Hi list,
> I'm expecting delivery of a new notebook any day now
> (woohoo!), and it
> comes with Windows XP Pro. In the past I usually
> wiped Windows off the
> disks of new PCs as a matter of course, and gave the
> MS license to
> somebody I hate... :)
> 
> This time I'm planning to keep a Windows partition
> and dual-boot the
> machine. The main reason is that I have to use some
> proprietary
> Windows-only software to get movies off my digital
> set top box. The
> files are typically anywhere from 1GB to 8GB in
> size, and I want to
> edit, transcode and burn them to DVD in FC4. The
> software doesn't work
> under Wine, and I don't want to spend money on a
> VMware license.
> 
> My question is this: what is the best filesystem for
> both OS'es to use
> for sharing these files?
> 
> I suppose NTFS is the way to go, since previous
> Windows filesystems
> don't support files that large (correct?), and
> Windows can't use any of
> Linux's filesystems (correct?).
> 
> Has NTFS support in FC4 matured to a point where it
> can be used to
> routinely process large files? How about
> performance?
> 
> The notebook comes with a 100GB disk, and I have to
> make this filesystem
> decision before I can decide on the split between
> Windows and Linux
> partitions.
> 
> Cheers
> Steffen.
> 
> > -- 
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> fedora-list at redhat.com
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First take the time to scandisk and defrag the NTFS
partition.  This will allow you to later install
Fedora.
Secondly after this is done, resize your partition to
accomodate for the Fedora Installation{You can use
SystemRescueCD, Knoppix, Kanotix, etc}.  Optionally
you might want to create a FAT32 partition.  This is
entirely up to you.
You can install Fedora then with your desired
configuration.  The NTFS drivers from
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/
work very well as they allow you to read files. 
Writing to this partition is strongly discouraged from
the linux side.  Get the rpm that matches your running
kernel, Become super user
# su - root
Password
and install it
# rpm -ivh kernel-ntfs-2.6.11-1369-FC4.i686.rpm???
# modprobe ntfs
# fdisk -l
Look for your partition and mount it 
# mkdir /mnt/windows or something like 
# mkdir /media/c_drive
# mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows -t ntfs -r -o
umask=0222
# ls -l /mnt/windows
If you want to automatically mount your windows
partition, add to /etc/fstab a line similar to

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs ro,umask=0222             
           0 0

If something goes wrong, please carefully read 
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/instructions.html

Some programs like DVDShrink, and DVDDecrypter work
with wine in Linux as I am trying now.  They do not
work as well as in windows;  I have a problem with the
fonts that are not loaded but I can see that some
programs are running. See from Frank's corner an
example DVDShrink
http://frankscorner.org/index.php?p=dvdshrink32
It does run, but not as well as it should in my case. 
Anyhow give it a try and hope for the best.  I believe
that it will work but it might be a matter of time.

Best Regards,

Antonio

P.S.  Sorry if you knew/know most of the above
information.  I know that it works because I set up a
computer for a friend and he runs both WindowsXP and
Fedora Core 4.  He can access the NTFS partition's
file but I adviced him to make a 3GB FAT32 partition
so that he could share file between the two OS's. 
Both partitions are mounted upon boot time and I guess
that he is happy with the configuration.


		
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