[LBo] Sharing files with Windows

[Jisao]

After much woes, I finally managed to a semblance of sanity with my 
computer. 

<rant>
Quite frankly, QTParted is a royal annoyance when it comes to complex 
partitioning schemes.  Thanks to that "RA" applications, I crashed my 
MBR twice, and got epic fights trying to partition my disk to my liking. 

For one thing, it won't touch a NTFS partition.  Like if it is a sacred 
cow.  I finally had to go back to windows, delete the NTFS partitions, 
recreate then without formatting them to go anywhere a little bit a at a 
time.  I was about to get my Debian Stable net install disk to get fdisk 
going (I did not have any Linux on my computer anymore, and the LiveCDs 
of Ubuntu and Kanotix both carry the infamous "QTParted". How is someone 
supposed to do serious work with that app...)

I consider myself a wiz at partitioning.  If I can't after years of 
doing it with a new gui app, I think I can legitimately wonder how a 
newbie will manage... 

Like Stefan writes:   </rant>

I did create an ext2 partition of 25 gig to share my files between Linux 
and Windows, like Stefan suggested last week.  I also did install the 
ext2 driver for Windows, to allow it to read ext2 files (seems it also 
reads ext3).  To my delight, I can see all my partitions now on Windows 
(including swap, partly).  There is the shared files partition, Ubuntu, 
Kanotix, etc.  Quite fun.  I still have to see how "strong" or "stable" 
the whole thing is. But I did manage to retrieve on my network files  
that were on that ext2 drive.

I recommend that you read the text file that comes with the driver.  It 
has one important information on it you need to know: those drives act 
like they are "mounted" on Windows, which means they have to be properly 
"unmounted" by restarting Windows properly. If you don't, you have some 
manual clean up to do with mount points.  It is all explained well in 
the file, but if you are in the habit of giving heart attacks to 
Windows, have mercy on your Linux partitions if you have the driver 
installed and restart properly.

Jisao
Getting to have a split personalities Win system.