Introduction (was Re: NTFS Question)

[Bill Moran]

hristopher Parker wrote:
> --- Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:
>>As far as I know that document is still accurate.
>>
>>Why don't you make a 55G NTFS partition for Win2k and a 5G FAT partition that
>>can be shared between all OSes?
> 
> Okay, here's my setup.
> 
> Two EIDE 100 GB drives. I want to partition each in half.
> 
> 50 GB - Drive 0, Partition 0: Windows 2000 Professional, maybe eventually Windows XP Professional
> 50 GB - Drive 0, Partition 1 (not including boot and swap): taHdeR GNU/Linux 8.0 Professional.
> 50 GB - Drive 1, Partition 0 (not including boot and swap): Debian GNU/Linux (Woody)
> 50 GB - Drive 1, Partition 1 (not including boot and swap, if applicable): FreeBSD 5.1
> 
> I'd love to have this kind of a multi-boot setup.

I'd love to have some steady work.  If you're interested in paying my hourly rate, I'd
be overjoyed to get both the FreeBSD & the Linux NTFS support fully working.

> I would like to be able to access all partitions from all other partitions, so if I'm in Windows
> 2000 and want to edit a config file for taHdeR 8.0 (maybe tested first with cygwin), it'll be
> easy, and I won't have to reboot to edit the file.

As someone else pointed out: if you reduce that partition to 32G, you can format it
FAT32 and access from Win/FreeBSD/Linux just fine.

> It doesn't look like I'm going to be able to create the first 50 GB partition with Windows 2000
> using FAT32, so I might have to break down and use NTFS. (Unless anyone knows of a good
> disk-copying utility. I have created a 50 GB FAT32 partition with a Windows ME bootdisk using
> fdisk and format, but can't copy all of the files over from the 2 GB HDD to the 50 GB partition,
> even with xcopy. Fails when copying over StarOffice 6.0 directories.)

It will always fail.  Did you see the Microsoft article posted here?  You can either
reduce the Win partition to about 30G or make another FAT partition that is accessible
by all systems.

> Also, anyone know of a good bootloader that will be able to handle Windows 2000, two GNU/Linux
> distributions, and FreeBSD for multi-boot capability?

If you install FreeBSD last and tell it to install booteasy, that will work.  You
also have LILO as an option.  And the Windows boot manager can be massaged into
doing what you want (I've seen howtos posted on the 'net)

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com