Need to share a drive between vista and SUSE 10.1

[Tobolo]

Is there anyway that I can format a 120gb drive in Vista with FAT32? I know that Vista doesn't do it, but are there any free programs out there that will do this for me?

Also any advice on sharing this drive?

~Tob

 

[QuixoticOne]

Huh? I thought Vista could format fat.
What happens when you go into administrative tools, computer management, disk management, select the disk, pick format? Or I suppose you might be able to get there from COMPUTER -> select the drive letter if it has one -> Right click -> Format.

Last I recalled it had an NTFS and FAT option, though the type of FAT would be one it would auto-determine based on capacity and media type etc.

As for SUSE... you can mount either NTFS or FAT disks.

formatting:
root: mkfs.vfat /dev/whatever
root: mkfs.ntfs /dev/whatever

mounting should be something like the following in /etc/fstab
/dev/whatever /mnt/whatever ntfs-3g rw 0 0

or
root: mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/whatever /mnt/whatever

there are some NTFS related permissions / security mount options in the man page you might want to review....

Same basic thing for FAT
mount -t vfat /dev/whatever /mnt/whatever

 

[Tobolo]

We checked vista and we could only format NTFS. We are both wanting to get into a linux os and learn about it, so we were basically newbs.

We ended up using cute partition to set it up and from there we were able to format it in SUSE via Fat32. Both systems were doing great when I left. Thanks for your help, and I will be checking out the main page information.

 

[Nothinman]

Huh? I thought Vista could format fat.

It probably can but MS won't let you put FAT on any filesystem over 32G these days.

 

[ethebubbeth]

With the recent 1.0 stable release of ntfs-3g, FAT32 is not the necessity it once was when sharing data between windows and unix-like operating systems. I know that it is available via apt in Ubuntu, and has been incredibly stable for me thus far.

 

[rasczak]

i have a dual boot windows xp and linux with my windows being partitioned in ntfs. linux can read everything on the windows drive right after install. I'm running ubuntu 7.10 icyw