Shared partition for music: which filesystem?

[mjolson]

Hello,

I'm running a dual-boot XP-Pro/Gentoo amd64 system. I have one 120GB HD, set up basically like so:

* 30G -- WinXP (NTFS)
* 40G -- mp3s (NTFS)
* 50G -- Gentoo (well, three partitions actually, but you know what I mean)

I have read-only NTFS support built into my kernel, and so far everything's going fine, almost. The problem is this: I can't write to the music partition! (Yes, yes, I knew it coming in. But I didn't know that when I first partitioned the disk, or when I ripped twenty-five gigs of music.) This is causing me a couple of problems: first, I can't modify any of my (Winamp-generated) playlists with XMMS (which would occasionally be a useful thing to do); second, I can't easily use cdparanoia to rip scratched or otherwise recalcitrant CDs.

I have enough disk left on my Gentoo partition to copy all of my music over and reformat the mp3 partition, if I need to. So, is there a filesystem I can use that'll allow read-write access to this music partition? How stable, for instance, is NTFS read/write?

Thanks,
--Matt
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man 3 strfry

[radonsg]

for myself, I'm using fat32. & I will recommend that u use fat32 too.

u must be real brave to try ntfs write.
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[Cintra]

Hei

I agree..

But there is something one needs to be careful about concerning long file names, and I'm sorry, but I can't remember what it is.. someone else?

regards
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"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" W.S.

[Dolio]

Alternatively, you could try using Captive NTFS. It uses lufs to wrap the Windows NTFS driver and allows read/write support for NTFS. Search the forums about it. There's a couple threads on setup, as I recall.

I've never used it myself, but from what I've read here, people who use it are big fans.

The in-kernel NTFS write support would be pretty much useless for your purposes. It only lets you overwrite existing files, and only without changing their size, so there's very little you can actually do.
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[motzky]

why not reformat the mp3 partition to ext2/ext3 and use one of the ext2 mounters for windows ?

I mainly run Gentoo (but have WinXP installed on a removable HD also) and this is how I share the music between the OSs
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greetz
motzky

[cylgalad]

fat32 is very slow under Linux but it's fast enough to play digital audio or video.
Better use ext3 with one of the numerous (and more or less working good) ext2/3 mounters for windoze (or buy Parangon Mount Everything that works well)