Install Fedora 8 and Vista as dual boot - how to share data?, and some more questions

[Troas]

Hi,

I'm about to install Fedora 8 on an Asus V1S that has Windows Vista Business pre-installed. This is the first time I'm installing Linux, so please excuse if some of my questions are sort of basic... :-) I've searched the forum and read the relevant posts, but I'm still not quite sure what the best option for me would be. So, any help from you would be greatly appreciated.
I would like to have a very large partition on my drive which I can read and write to from both OS's. These appear to be the options:
- create a large data fat partition which both OS's can read/write to
- create a large data NTFS partition and use ntfs-3g to allow Linux to write to it
- create a large ext3 partition and use EXT2 IFS (or similar) to allow Vista to write to it

I will use my notebook at work and whatever option I choose, it needs to be a reliable way to store my data! :-)

Furthermore, I have a number of other things which I'm not completely clear about:
- does my /home partition have to be ext3 or can it also be vfat?
- if it needs to be ext3, how small can it be considering that I would like to store my data on a partition common to both OS's?
- would it be OK if Vista is 32-bit and Fedora is 64-bit?

In the end, my drive should look something like this:
- primary partition: sda1, NTFS, Vista, ~28 GB
- extended partition: sda2
- sda5, ext3, /boot, ~200 MB
- sda6, ext3, /, ~20 GB
- sda7, -, /swap, 5 GB (eventually, I guess I will be installing 4 GB of RAM)
- sda8, fat, /home, Rest of the 160 GB (if this is possible)
alternatively:
- sda8, ext3, /home, ? MB
- sda9, fat, /data, Rest of the 160 GB
(provided that fat would be the best option for storing data, see options above)

Again, thanks a lot for your help!

[markkuk]

- does my /home partition have to be ext3 or can it also be vfat?
/home must be ext3 or some other native Linux filesystem, not FAT or NTFS.

- if it needs to be ext3, how small can it be considering that I would like to store my data on a partition common to both OS's?
You should use a separate partition for transferring data between operating systems, not /home. Many programs depend on files in /home having the correct protection, ownership and SELinux labels. The EXT2 IFS driver doesn't maintain access rights and has other restrictions: http://www.fs-driver.org/faq.html#not_sup_feat

- would it be OK if Vista is 32-bit and Fedora is 64-bit?

Yes, Vista has no effect at all to Fedora.

[morecoffee]

Welcome, 5 gigs of swap might be overkill, I could see 2 or 3 gigs but with 4 gigs of physical RAM you won't need that much swap. Your partitioning looks ok although you would want to format /home ext3, Maybe make a large fat or NTFS partition /data, create a folder on /data maybe called sharesu -c 'mkdir /data/share' which your Linux user has write permissions su -c 'chown foo /data/share' then link it to your home folder.mkdir /home/foo/share ln -s -d /data/share /home/foo/share From there I'm sure you can figure out the Windows side of things. -Good Luck Dave

[Troas]

Welcome, 5 gigs of swap might be overkill, I could see 2 or 3 gigs but with 4 gigs of physical RAM you won't need that much swap.

OK, thanks. I had read somewhere that swap should be at least the size of the physical RAM, so I figured it should be bigger than 4 GB.

Your partitioning looks ok although you would want to format /home ext3, Maybe make a large fat or NTFS partition /data, create a folder on /data maybe called sharesu -c 'mkdir /data/share' which your Linux user has write permissions su -c 'chown foo /data/share' then link it to your home folder.mkdir /home/foo/share ln -s -d /data/share /home/foo/share

OK, but if /home has to be ext3, this then leaves me with the question of how large this partition should be, right?

From there I'm sure you can figure out the Windows side of things. -Good Luck Dave

I hope so! :)

Thanks for your help!

-Jan

[Troas]

...the reason why I would like to have such a large partition that I can write to from both OS's is that I plan to analyze data sets on my notebook that, altogether, will occupy several GB of space. I would like to be able to access these data sets from both Windows and Linux without having to double these files on my hard drive (i.e., having the same data on NTFS and ext3).

[PabloTwo]

I dual boot W2K and FC6. I have two Windows partitions, both NTFS. One being the primary Windows boot partition with the entire W2K install and all the Windows programs, the other containing just data which I share between Windows and Linux. I don't even mount the primary Windows ntfs partition in my Linux system, only the ntfs data partition, partly for security reasons, and partly to protect that primary Windows partition from me screwing something up in there while I'm in linux.

NTFS is a more structured and efficient file system than vfat, so I would recommend going with ntfs for your shared data partition over vfat. It works great for me.

Paul

[Troas]

/home must be ext3 or some other native Linux filesystem, not FAT or NTFS.

OK, thanks for pointing this out.

You should use a separate partition for transferring data between operating systems, not /home. Many programs depend on files in /home having the correct protection, ownership and SELinux labels.

OK, could you perhaps specify what sort of programs depend on this? And let me describe in more detail what I would like to do: I would like to analyze data sets using programs like freesurfer (http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/) or fsl (http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/). I would like to write the results of these analyses (several GB) to a partition that I can also access from Windows. Do you think it would be OK if I write these data to a fat (or ntfs?) partition instead of my /home ext3 partition?

Yes, Vista has no effect at all to Fedora.

OK, thanks again for your help!

-Jan

[Troas]

Thanks for your response! Yes, because of NTFS supposedly being a better file system I would tend to prefer it, too. I'm only sort of reluctant because of a friend of mine told me that he wasn't sure that Linux ntfs write access really works (I'm not quite sure though what "really" was supposed to mean in that context...). I'm glad to hear though that it works for you! :)

-Jan

[leadgolem]

Would it be easier to just mount your vista ntfs drive?

[morecoffee]

OK, but if /home has to be ext3, this then leaves me with the question of how large this partition should be, right?

I would only make it a few gigs, if you are going to store everything in your shared folder/partition.

[Troas]

Would it be easier to just mount your vista ntfs drive?

Well, I guess that's sort of what I'm trying to find out. I'm wondering whether writing rather large amounts of data to a (Vista) NTFS partition from Fedora will be as reliable and as fast as writing them to a FAT partition...

[leadgolem]

Yes and yes. It would also be safer then writing data to a fat/fat32 partition since ntfs supports journaling.

[Troas]

OK, thank you! So, I think I'll give ntfs-3g a try...

[Troas]

Just some feedback: I installed Fedora 8 64-bit yesterday. First, I defragmented the Vista partition with PerfectDisk (after several cycles of online defragmenting and defragmenting during the boot I was also able to move the stubborn Master File Table). Then, I shrank the Vista partition [C:] and deleted the Windows data partition [D:] using the built-in Windows tool. After this, I used gparted to create a new extended partition with the logical partitions I wanted (including a large NTFS partition to store my data on) and then installed Fedora. So far, this seems to work fine! Thanks a lot for your help! :)