Sharing Harddrive between OS's

jordo_99 · 06-08-2007, 07:21 PM

Hey, just decided that I want to partition my harddrive into linux and XP sections but have a shared partition for both to use...can I do that?

If I can't then I'll just split it down the middle or something...no big deal. I just want to have all my movies and music on both OS and that's A LOT of space.

macdude425 · 06-08-2007, 07:40 PM

Oh sure, it's possible. You'll want the shared partition to be FAT32 (this would probably be the best option) or NTFS (which requires a copy of NTFS-3G - don't worry, read-write is INCREDIBLY stable.)

snypercore · 06-08-2007, 09:12 PM

what do i have to do in XP to allow linux to read/write to a hard drive and/or partition, i always get error you do not have permission. im guessing it XP blocking any users that arent in the list but i forget how to allow users?

Greg · 06-08-2007, 11:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by macdude425

Oh sure, it's possible. You'll want the shared partition to be FAT32 (this would probably be the best option) or NTFS (which requires a copy of NTFS-3G - don't worry, read-write is INCREDIBLY stable.)

Just wondering, does NTFS have any noticeable advantages over FAT32?

macdude425 · 06-09-2007, 12:08 AM

If for some reason you want to transfer a 4GB+ file to the spare drive in Windows, then yes, it does.

Quote:

what do i have to do in XP to allow linux to read/write to a hard drive and/or partition, i always get error you do not have permission. im guessing it XP blocking any users that arent in the list but i forget how to allow users?

Quite frankly - I don't know. I haven't had to use Windows itself for something like that in quite a while. Others here would be able to better advise you, however, if worse came to worse, just use a root shell, and be VERY careful.

jordo_99 · 06-09-2007, 06:01 PM

alright, thanks for the help guys. I'll start some digging with what you've given me and if I have any trouble I'll post something again here.

jordo_99 · 06-18-2007, 01:56 PM

ok, now I've set up the partition and I've gotten Kubuntu to recognize it but now I can't actually access the files. It keeps giving me this error:

An error occurred while enabling /Shared HD.
The system reported: mount: /dev/disk/by-label/Shared already mounted or /Shared HD busy
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sda2 is already mounted on /Shared HD

Details:
Return code from mount was 32.
"mount failure"

*note* I've set up the HD with NTFS.

Under 'System Settings > Disk & Filesystems' the HD isn't enabled and when I try to enable it I get that error.

Thanks for any help guys

macdude425 · 06-19-2007, 01:51 AM

Can you go to a terminal, cd /Shared*HD and see the files?

jordo_99 · 06-19-2007, 12:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by macdude425

Can you go to a terminal, cd /Shared*HD and see the files?

No, it's not giving me access to anything. I have very little experience with the programming-code side of linux so far if that's what you meant by 'terminal'.

I checked on the ubuntu.com forums and found a guide for this, but at the top it said something about feisty not needing to go through the process, but I tried it anyways...no go. (this was before I posted on the forums)

Thanks for the quick responce macdude.

macdude425 · 06-19-2007, 02:20 PM

Terminal is NOT programming - it's the Linux equivalent of the windows cmd.exe - only 100x as powerful.

Go to the terminal (you'll have to at some point), and type "sudo umount /dev/sda2". If you hit enter, it may ask for a password - give it your user's password, and if it comes back to the prompt, type "sudo ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 /Shared*HD -o rw" and hit enter. If it comes back to the prompt again, try to access the drive - do NOT try to use any of Ubuntu's tools to mount it again.

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