Introduction (was Re: NTFS Question)

[Jud]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 06:48:13 -0700 (PDT), Christopher Parker 
<cparker15 at yahoo.com> 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 had a BIOS limitation so that my BIOS only supported up to 30-something 
> GB. So, I had to install
> Windows 2000 on an old 2 GB drive until I could get my BIOS issue 
> resolved. I eventually flashed
> my BIOS, so now I want to move Windows 2000 onto the first partition of 
> the first drive (with 50
> GB of space), and install the rest accordingly.
>
> 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.
>
> Or, maybe I'll want to boot into FreeBSD to get the hang of it, but will 
> still want to be able to
> go into the "My Documents" folder on the Windows 2000 partition to edit 
> my "to do" plain text file
> to eliminate the things I have to do to get a stable system with my Un*x 
> operating systems all on
> one machine.
>
> 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.)
>
> 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?
>
> Wow. That was a lot. Thanks for reading.

I wonder if you can write to NTFS from Linux and FreeBSD using VMware.  
Anyone know?

But anyhow, there's a relatively easy way to do this.  As Bill Moran has 
already suggested, just make yourself a FAT32 partition, say 5GB, out of 
the 50 you were planning to use for Win2K.  Anything you want to work on 
from Linux or FreeBSD you can copy to the FAT32 partition, even when you're 
not in Windows - after all, copying from a file involves reading that file, 
not writing to it.  If 45GB feels like too little for Win2K, take part or 
all of it from RedHat, and/or make the FAT32 partition a bit smaller, say 
2GB.  You won't need to install an OS on the Fat32 partition, so you can 
use all the space as your cross-OS "playground."  You certainly don't want 
to make your entire Win2K filesystem FAT32 - from all I've read and heard, 
NTFS is the superior filesystem.  Having used Win98 and Win2K myself for 
years, I can tell you my personal opinion is that Win2K is better by a 
country mile, and NTFS may have something to do with that.

That takes care of working with Win files when in *nix.  Vice versa, I 
can't tell you - I've got Cygwin installed, but haven't used it enough to 
know whether it can recognize your *nix filesystems from Windows.  (Seems 
doubtful, but I'm no expert.)

Bootloader: The FreeBSD and NT bootloaders should be able to do what you 
want, at the price of some fiddling.  (See the FAQ about the NT bootloader 
on FreeBSD's web site.)  For more ease and configurability there's Grub; I 
think you'll have to have it or Lilo installed to make your Linuxen 
bootable anyhow.  Haven't used XOSL, but hear generally good things.  Then 
there are the automagic boot managers, GAG and BootItNG, which configure 
most of your boot menu for you.  GAG is free (as in both beer and speech, I 
believe) and a bit (but just a bit) easier to configure.  BootItNG is 
shareware (free 30-day trial, around $30-35 after that), and besides being 
a boot manager, it does imaging and partition resizing.  I used BootItNG 
for years and have recently been trying out GAG; neither has given me any 
trouble at all with a multiboot system a bit more complicated than your 
setup.  (Win2K and FreeBSD-CURRENT on 40GB each of an 80GB RAID-0 array 
controlled by a Promise onboard chip; Gentoo Linux and Win98 on a third 
20GB drive.  I used Grub for quite a while until I did the RAID setup.  At 
the time Grub didn't work at all with RAID, and I'm not certain how well it 
does so now.)

Jud