Save me Linux!

a5y

Hey guys, I need your help. Badly. It's about the UNIX file system.

I'm the (not especially proud) owner of a six month old macbook that has to get sent back to Apple because 1) My DVD burner is broken and loud as a tumbledrier and 2) a crack appeared overnight in the casing (seemingly not an isolated problem http://blueeyedcreature.net/apple/CrackBook.jpg looks identical to mine, but I digress).

Because I can't use the DVD burner to back up all my files before I send away the laptop I bought a portable hard disk to use instead (a 160 gig Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini).

• If I format the hard disk to use the UNIX file format, can my family's Windows XP PC running a live CD copy of Ubuntu read the disk?
• And can it burn the contents onto CDs, without the need for any more drivers?

(I ask as I am about 99% sure windows XP doesn't know the difference between a UNIX file systemed USB hard disk and a stale egg mayonnaise sandwich jammed in there by a malicious 4 year old).

MarkR

I seem to recall having some difficulties with read / write permission on a fat32 drive. Think it should be ok if it's formatted as ext3?

Khannie

Windows wont give you any love for ext3 AFAIK. Fat32 or NTFS is the way to format the external drive.

PogMoThoin

Accessing ext2 is possible thru windows with software, but ext3 is not AFAIK. Looked in2 it before but never did it. NTFS would be the way to go.

MarkR

http://www.fs-driver.org/ has a ext3 driver for windows. Tried it before without a problem. If not go for ntfs as above.

a5y

In the Mac disk utility menu it doesn't give you multiple choices about the table, asside from 3 different variations of formatting it for Mac OS X it only offers "Unix file format", and doesn't specify if it is EXT2 or EXT3. I'll try and find out which it would use.

I've tried connecting it to the PC running windows XP - no luck (as expected), and unfortunately I've had no luck connecting it to the same PC booted from a live CD of Ubuntu (v4.10), the only Live CD I have lying around.

I couldn't find any information in the Ubuntu help files on mounting a USB hard disk, it only refers to floppies. (I should point out I've never tried mounting a disk in Linux, live or otherwise, ever, so I'm only going by the help files. I couldn't navigate to /etc/fstab either.)

Could it be that the distro is too old to recognise EXT2 / EXT3? Or that the "UNIX file system" that Mac OS X disk utility offers is something different to either? (According to http://www.intuitive.com/blog/ubuntu_linux_yellowdog_linux_and_mac_os_x_all_on_one_powerbook.html "Mac OS X doesn’t include native support for ext2 and ext3 file systems" but I might not be reading that the right way)

I'm thinking of trying to again with a different distro, such as Puppy Linux, but would be eager to hear what anyone else thinks could be the problem.

Snowbat

You could just go with one of the 'Mac OS X' formats - Ubuntu can read and write HFS+ partitions:
HOWTO: Mount an OS X Hard Drive from a Ubuntu LiveCD