Co-locating FC4 and XP - advice sought

[Jonathan Berry]

On 7/12/05, Steffen Kluge <kluge at fujitsu.com.au> wrote:
> Hi list,
> I'm expecting delivery of a new notebook any day now (woohoo!), and it

Cool, what kind? (out of curiosity)

> 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?

About the only way to share files *both ways* is to use fat32 (aka vfat).

> 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?).

Right, I think fat32 is limited to 4 GB files and Windows does not
natively support any Linux filesystems.  There are, however, ext2
drivers for Windows.  I've never tried them, so I have no idea how
well they would work:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd

> Has NTFS support in FC4 matured to a point where it can be used to
> routinely process large files? How about performance?

You can read files just fine.  I have no idea about performance, but I
would expect it to be about like Windows.  There is *very* little
write support, though.  You can change files (sometimes) as long as
you do not change the size (and I'm not sure how you be sure that is
the case).  Not very useful.  And Fedora ships with the NTFS module
turned off, so you have to get a seperate rpm:
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/
or Livna has rpms too.

> 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.

Antonio gave you some good pointers on doing the resizing and such. 
It sounds like you may need to only read these video files from
Windows to process them in Linux.  If that is the case, just resize
the NTFS partition, install Fedora, and get the NTFS driver.  If you
ever want to share (small) files from Fedora to Windows, also add a
fat32 partition.

> Cheers
> Steffen.

Jonathan