Flying gParted

[Christopher Lees]

On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 12:00 +0000, The Wassermans wrote:
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:06:54 +1100
> From: The Wassermans <dwass at optusnet.com.au>
> Subject: Flying gParted
> To: "ubuntu-au at lists.ubuntu.com" <ubuntu-au at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Message-ID: <47B3861E.3040407 at optusnet.com.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> Trying to fly gParted without success.
> 
> Please:
> 1.    Interpret  the partition information in the attached file.
> 
> 2.    Do I already have a free partition that I can adapt to pool data 
> files created and accessible to Ubuntu and Windows, as the case may be.  
> What steps from here to achieve that?
> 
> 3   Is there a better product to use for partitioning?
> 
> Dave W

Hi Dave,

The information attached shows a SATA hard drive partitioned into two
Linux ext3 partitions, one Windows NTFS partition, and seemingly two
swap partitions.

Ubuntu can read and write NTFS partitions, so you could just use your
big NTFS partition for that. It is already accessible to you
under /media/disk-2. The read/write speeds won't be too impressive, but
it will work safely.

One of your ext3 partitions is already mounted at /media/disk-1. I
imagine this is the partition that you really want to use as a dedicated
Windows-Linux data pool. If so, (I haven't used Gparted in ages)
right-click /dev/sda2 and you'll see some kind of option to change the
partition to "Fat32". This is the most common filesystem format to use
to transfer data between Windows and any other operating system. The
speeds will be good, but remember that Fat32 has a filesize limit of 4
gigabytes! This operation will destroy all data on /dev/sda2 (the drive
that is mounted at /media/disk-1) so copy all information off that drive
first onto a different partition or a DVD, before changing the
filesystem format.

The final option is to install an Ext2 / Ext3 filesystem driver for
Windows so you can access the /dev/sda2 or /dev/sda4 (root) filesystem
from within Windows. Due to the fact that Linux supports lots of special
characters in filenames and Windows doesn't, you'll find that some files
on your Ubuntu partition cannot be accessed on Windows. There are also
security implications - an attacker who has compromised the Windows side
of your computer can easily install a rootkit or something into the
mounted Ubuntu partition.

Frankly, your best option is to access the NTFS partition from within
Ubuntu. Everything should already be set up for that; if you can't get
write access you will need to change the permissions of /media/disk-2 so
that you have read/write access.