What format for shared drive Linux / Windows

[Haole Boy]

Aloha everyone. My bench machine is a dual-boot Linux Mint 19.1 / Windows 7. I have an internal 6TB drive in it to store output from ddrescue and it is formatted with the ext4 file system. Unfortunately, this prevents it from being used as a target for Fab's as Windows cannot read / write to ext4 file systems. I've been doing some googling on how to get Windows to read/write to ext4 and I'm not getting a really good feeling about any of the "solutions" I'm finding (especially the ones that allow you to write to ext4).

So, I see three options, and would appreciate feedback from anyone who has experience with this

1) Keep the drive ext4 and find a program that gives windows read/write capability. If you have a program / driver that you like to use for this, please let me know what it is.

2) Reformat the drive to NTFS. How good / reliable is the Linux Mint support for read/write on NTFS?

3) Reformat the drive to exFAT. How good / reliable is the Linux Mint and Windows support read/write for exFAT?

Or, does anyone have any other suggestions?

P.S. Yes, I realize that I will need to upgrade the Win 7 to Win 10, but I still have a lot of residential customers on Win 7 who have NO interest in upgrading, and I like having a Win 7 system available so I can remember what things looked like and how to work with it.

Mahalo,

Harry Z

 

[Markverhyden]

Why dual boot? Why not just to Linux and run W7 in a VM or vice-a-versa?

To be honest I've had a few issues with exFAT and M$ OS's. Personally I just enable NTFS support in Linux so I can read and write to those disks. Did the same on my OS X boxes.

https://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/

 

[backwoodsman]

Linux NTFS support is very good and reliable. NTFS isn't my favorite file system, but if you have to share a partition between Linux and Windows, it's the simplest choice. It's what I use for that.

 

[Haole Boy]

Why dual boot? Why not just to Linux and run W7 in a VM or vice-a-versa?

To be honest I've had a few issues with exFAT and M$ OS's. Personally I just enable NTFS support in Linux so I can read and write to those disks. Did the same on my OS X boxes.

https://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/

I've never had much success with VMs. I seem to spend hours trying to get them to work and I don't get any productive work done. Also, I'm somewhat a novice with Linux, so I'm rather hesitant to try a VM based on past experience. If I do decide to go down this route, I'm assuming that I can NOT run ddrescue from a VM (so I would need to install the VM on Linux and then run Win 7 in the VM). Correct?

And Mahalo for the feedback on NTFS on linux. Nice to know it's dependable.

Linux NTFS support is very good and reliable. NTFS isn't my favorite file system, but if you have to share a partition between Linux and Windows, it's the simplest choice. It's what I use for that.

Mahalo for taking the time to reply.

 

[Markverhyden]

I've never had much success with VMs. I seem to spend hours trying to get them to work and I don't get any productive work done. Also, I'm somewhat a novice with Linux, so I'm rather hesitant to try a VM based on past experience. If I do decide to go down this route, I'm assuming that I can NOT run ddrescue from a VM (so I would need to install the VM on Linux and then run Win 7 in the VM). Correct?

And Mahalo for the feedback on NTFS on linux. Nice to know it's dependable.

Yeah, NTFS read/write has been stable for many years in Linux.

And yes, you can run ddrescue from within a VM. Just have to make sure the proper port is mapped. You ought to give the VM thing a try. Virtual Box is free and very popular.

 

[DataMedics]

And yes, you can run ddrescue from within a VM.

Yes, and no. It might work, but the windows host controller will still be under the hood getting in the way and probably BSOD'ing the machine at the first couple bad sectors. For ddrescue to work well you really should be running native Linux. So I'd probably recommend putting Windows in the VM and keeping Linux on the bare metal. It'd probably be more stable that way anyway.

Linux NTFS support is very good and reliable. NTFS isn't my favorite file system, but if you have to share a partition between Linux and Windows, it's the simplest choice. It's what I use for that.

This suggestion about formatting the drive to NTFS is spot on. Ext on a Windows machine is spotty at best, but Linux works perfectly with NTFS now. The only one thing you've got to watch out for is that if a drive (such as an internal SATA drive) isn't cleanly disconnected from the machine Linux will refuse to mount it. Shouldn't matter if you're dual booting though since a shutdown should result in a clean dismount. It's just if you're plugging / unplugging between OSs it becomes an issue.

 

[fencepost]

On Windows 7 with NTFS and shutting down the Windows side should be OK, but don't hibernate it.

If/when you upgrade it to 10, you'll probably need to disable "Fast Startup" (aka hybrid shutdown) because it's actually partial hibernation and may lock the NTFS volume.

 

[NJW]

+1 for what they said. Forget exFAT, NTFS is fine for Linux.

Consider sharing the large data storage drive, when it doesn't matter what the filesystem is – Fabs can write to network storage and if you boot the machine under test from Linux (System Rescue CD, Partition Magic, ...) you can write the ddrescue output to the network, too.

For Fabs and ddrescue on bare drives, where the machine under test is not bootable, you really need a separate system – almost anything will do, it doesn't have to be super spec. Although I use virtual machines extensively (I have no Windows hardware), I wouldn't do diagnostics or backup using a VM.

Shouldn't matter if you're dual booting though since a shutdown should result in a clean dismount.

But switch off Fast Boot in Win10.

Late extra: @fencepost had less to type ...

 

[Haole Boy]

Mahalo for all the replies. Was playing with my Linux / Win 7 box yesterday and then while running on the Linux side, plugged in a Linux USB stick. No immediate issues, but when I went to reboot I just got a GRUB command prompt. Spent waayyyyy too much time trying to figure out what went wrong. I will need to plug in the USB stick from time to time again, and I can't have it trashing GRUB, so I reformatted my drive and reinstalled Linux Mint and will be running Win 7 in VirtualBox. You'll probably see a few questions as I try to get this set up.

Mahalo for your assistance!

Harry Z

 

[nerd2u]

Just a word of caution with Linux and USB drives, make sure to dismount them before pulling them Linux does not like when drives are just yanked out.

Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk

 

[backwoodsman]

Just a word of caution with Linux and USB drives, make sure to dismount them before pulling them Linux does not like when drives are just yanked out.

True, but the same is true of Windows, of course.