looking for ideas: creating a data partition for a dual boot system

[Jerry McAllister]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 03:43:14PM -0500, Aryeh Friedman wrote:

> I have both vista and freebsd 8-current installed on the same drive
> and also have allocated the rest of the disk to be a fat32 partition.
>  I know I should put any data I want to be passed between the two on
> the fat32 partition.   Now the question is how to lay it out so that:
> 
> 1. The home dir for my account of FreeBSD = Vista account's root dir
> 2. Share the same Desktop folder (I think if #1 is solved this is automatic)

In FreeBSD you can just change the login(home) directory field in 
the /etc/passwd file for the account.   Use  vipw(8) to do the editing.
But, you may not want to do that because there are some differences in
a MS fat32 filesystem and the UNIX type filesystem that FreeBSD uses.
Some ownership and permission and link information will be lost.

Instead, just mount that fat32 file system as 'msdosfs' type on to
some nice mnemonic mount point and work on it there.   I use "/mydos"
for mounting my fat32 partition in FreeBSD.   Then, you can
address files in it as /mydos/somedir/somefile.    If you have a 
group of files you want to address as if they are in your home dir,
than make a symlink to their directory.

   cd
   ln -s /mydos/goodstuff goodstuff

Then any time you cd to ~/goodstuff you will really get /mydos/goodstuff

Pick your own names.

As for how to deal with it in MS-Vista, it will show up as another
drive, say e:  or  maybe f:  It will not be root as far as I can
tell.   But it might be possible to make it your desktop.
I avoid MS mostly.

////jerry

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