Accesing hard drive from windows and vice versa?

[mizzy]

Just curious really.

 

This lapotp is dual booted with windows. Sometimes I have had to switch over to windows to print something or edit something before logging back into linux. Is there a way that I can access the docs off windows part of the hard drive on linux? and the same vice versa, so once i'm in windows, I can access the docs on linux's paritition?

 

Thanks

[zepcom]

Just curious really.  

This lapotp is dual booted with windows. Sometimes I have had to switch over to windows to print something or edit something before logging back into linux. Is there a way that I can access the docs off windows part of the hard drive on linux? and the same vice versa, so once i'm in windows, I can access the docs on linux's paritition?

 

Thanks

 

 

Mizzy,

I know that you can mount a Windows partition in Linux. User ZNX posted a great how-to on this forum here. As far as I'm aware, if the windows partition is Fat32, it can be mounted read-write, but if the partition is NTFS, some linuxes can only mount that readonly (you cannot change any files on it.)

 

As far as the other way around, I do not know of any way that a Windows partition can read a linux partition live.

 

One alternative is that you can create a partition on your drive in addition to the two you already have (win32 partition and linux partition) as type FAT16 (total size limitation is 2gb)... but you could set up your fstab in linux to automatically mount this partition (the link above is helpful for this task, you'd need to adapt it slightly) and use that area to save your "common files" that you'd want to share between linux and windows in here. Linux can mount that partition read-write, and in Windows, it would just be another drive letter.

 

Another alternative, depending on if you have sufficient resources, is to split up the tasks perhaps. If you have enough hardware for another pc (even an old pentium would work) then load linux on that too, just all linux partitions are needed, and make one dedicated area for all your stuff. Next, install and configure samba on that linux machine, as well as NFS if you need to access those files from your linux-boot on your laptop. See where I'm going here?

 

Now you can connect to that second machine no matter if you are booted with win32 or linux, and your files will be there over the network.

 

Just some possibilities for you to think about. I personally have done the latter on my network at home, and the combination of samba (file sharing to windows machines) and nfs (file sharing to linux hosts) fits all the needs.

[hybrid]

If your Linux distribution uses ext2 or ext3 (most do, with the exception of SUSE), you can use the tool here to mount your Linux partitions into Windows drive letters.

 

[/url][url=http://www.fs-driver.org/]http://www.fs-driver.org/

 

Beware though, file system permissions don't work at all, so you or any user on your Windows system could accidentally delete grub.conf or something.

 

Enjoy :)