When I got my external drive I formatted it as NTFS. Little did I know that NTFS doesn't play very well with linux. There are tools that will help you to read from the drive, but they tell you not to write to the drive. Damn. I guess it's not as portable as I thought.
I guess I can either move everything off the drive and re-format it or I just do any reading / writing through a windows box. It'll probably be better to use it as a backup drive anyways. Ah well. Now I guess the next steps would be to get a new (big) drive for my linux box. I also want to get a new (non-super-crappy) monitor, but those things can wait. We'll see.
Yes, it does suck that Linux doesn't play nicely with NTFS. Since it's an external drive, you should probably reformat it, since this will cause many problems in the future if you want to hook it up to anything other than windows NT. This includes Windows 98, Linux, as well as just about any other OS. You may think now that you can do with only writing to it from windows, but you're attitude will change when you need to hook this drive up to some other machine. I like to use FAT32 for anything that I'm going to be using between OSes. It's supported on just about every OS I've ever seen. Maybe split the drive into a couple partitions and experiment with different file systems. I'm running Linux on ReiserFS, which is supposed to be a pretty fast file system. From what I can see, it seems faster than EXT. Anyway, just a reminder, Windows 98 won't read or write to that drive, so it's probably better to use fat32.
ReplyDeleteThe downside to FAT32 is that the writes aren't atomic, which means if the drive is disconnected or the computer crashes, it could be left in an inconsistent state. Most of the time Scandisk can repair FAT32 partitions after that, but sometimes it can't! Beware!
ReplyDeleteI lost 3 partitions worth of data in 2002 because my motherboard was crashy. Since then I've switched to NTFS to protect the drives.
Another option is to partition the disk. You should do this anyway to waste less space per partially-used chunks -- in Windows XP, right click on a file and compare "Size" and "Size on disk" for an idea of this waste. Sometimes it's small, other times it's huge ... and it adds up.
You should really partition a monster drive anyway. There's no practical reason to have a partition any larger than 20-50GB, even if you were recording high quality video. That way if you ever have a munged partition (ie. the lookup table) it won't affect the rest of the partitions on the drive!
Another option for mounting NTFS from Linux: Samba, as long as you have an NT-compatible computer on your network to connect the drive to.
Yes. I have noticed that FAT 32 isn't very fault tolerant. Neither is EXT 2. Which is what som Linux distros use by default. I've ran into a lot of problems with EXT 2 becoming inconsistent, which is why I run ReiserFS now. I think Ryan is right about the partitions though. Having 1 big partition is not the way to do things. It can cause lots of problems. Going over Samba kind of defeats the purpose of a removable drive though. If you have to have a certain machine on to access the drive, then you might as well have an internal drive. The whole point of an External drive is so you can move it between computers.
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