Now that I’m getting more serious about switching to Linux, I had to come up with a good strategy for sharing data between Linux and Windows. I still need Windows XP for games, and potentially for a few other applications, so I’m not quite ready to give it up completely. Unfortunately, sharing data between the two operating systems still isn’t trivial.

The first problem is that Linux still does not support writing to NTFS partitions. Read-only access works fine these days, and there are some experimental solutions for writing, but none of these are stable, tested, and support full access to NTFS shares. Not that I blame Linux or its developers, since the problem is due to the closed specs for the NTFS file system that Microsoft isn’t releasing. These days, NTFS is pretty much the standard file system on Windows XP systems. I switched from FAT to NTFS a long time ago, when I installed Windows 2000. Nowadays, FAT(32) isn’t even a feasible option any more, as Windows XP isn’t able to format FAT32 partitions greater than 32GB. I wasn’t even aware of this limitation until I tried to format my new 250GB SATA drive with FAT32 and found this option to be missing… This is truly lame, as most new hard drives have capacities between 100GB and 300GB. Of course, this is simply Microsoft’s way of forcing people to use the proprietary NTFS file system and thereby preventing them from using other operating systems, since they cannot access the data on these partitions.

Luckily, there are still ways of getting larger FAT32 partitions working. They simply need to be created and formatted in another OS. After using the Linux fdisk and mkfs.vfat tools to partition and format my new drive, I was able to access it from both Linux and Windows without any problems. Now I just need to perform some major hard drive copy operations to move my data around, as it is not possible to convert NTFS partitions back to FAT32. In my case, this is easy to accomplish because I bought a new drive at this opportunity. Otherwise, things would be even more annoying…