Sharing files between Ubuntu 6.06 and Windows XP Pro - best disk format to use

[Gabriel Dragffy]

Duncan Lithgow wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-02-03 at 06:02 -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
>> Hi, another question:
>>
>> I'd like to share files for read-write access between Windows XP and
>> Ubuntu 6.06. To be specific, I'd like to share two partitions: 1. a VM
>> (virtual machine for VMware); and, 2. files to be served up by apache
>> and smbd in that VM.
>>
>> What is the best disk format to use? FAT, NTFS, ext3?
> FAT: Reliable, proven to work. But not the greatest on-disk filesystem.
> NTFS: Reportedly stable, supported by some kernels (not sure if Ubuntu
> 6.06 supports it). Support for read/write from linux is newer and
> theoretically therefore less dependable. But I haven't heard much about
> it.
> EXT3: Will only work if you install a special file browser in windows.
> 
> So, go to wikipedia and other places, do some homework and take your
> pick - they're all possible.
> 
> Most people use FAT32 for this purpose.
> 
> Duncan
> 
> 

Hey!! I've got some experience of this myself. Essentially FAT sucks, 
really badly, only use it as a last resort. Getting NTFS read/write in 
linux is not easy, nor foolproof, but if you want it then you should be 
looking at NTFS 3G I think.

Ext3, however, is fantastic under ubuntu and it works really really well 
under XP. Personally if I had XP installed then I would have a small 
data partition for XP system, everything else (userland) would be 
formatted ext3. the driver from http://www.fs-driver.org/ works like a 
charm.