File System for USB Disk?
Bob Chiodini
rchiodin at bellsouth.net
Tue Aug 2 13:13:12 UTC 2005
On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 09:03 -0400, James Pifer wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 08:31, James Pifer wrote:
> > I have 160 gig hard disk installed in a USB 2 enclosure.
> >
> > What is the best file system to put on it?
> >
> > It would be nice to be able to plug it into both Linux and Windows
> > machines. Obviously NTFS is not an option. Windows can't read linux
> > drives. So what does that leave me with?
> >
> > Linux is my primary choice, so I put ext3 on it using qtparted.
> >
> > When I plug it into my laptop, the light on the usb enclosure flashes,
> > but I don't see anything under /media. Is there any way to force a
> > refresh? /etc/fstab has this:
> > /dev/sdb1 /media/usbdisk ext3
> > pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
> >
> > Once I get that working, how do I deal with permissions since my userid
> > will not be able to write to it? Should I give my userid ownership of
> > /media/usbdisk? Will those permissions "stick" when I remove and plug
> > the drive in again?
> >
>
> Got some of it working. /media/usbdisk wasn't there so I created it and
> gave my userid permissions. Now when I plug in the drive I get the
> Removable Device icon on the desktop and I can open it, read/write, etc.
> Still looking for suggestions on the file system if anyone has one.
>
> Thanks,
> James
>
James,
Vfat, I think, is your only choice for both windows and Linux.
We have a USB/Firewire drive here and I found that using vfat is the
easiest way. There appears to be a 2 GB file size limitation for vfat.
To get around this, I formatted mine as ext3 and shared it via samba.
While not a portable solution it works in the office.
Bob...
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