Dual-boot data access

[jasonpf]

Ok, I've seen posts where people talked about captive-ntfs, fuse, and then ntfsprogs with write support. I am looking for some advice, perhaps from people who are already sharing large drives accross OSes. Here's my setup:
Laptop with 100 GB drive, a 60 GB ext3 data partition
External SATA 250 GB drive with ntfs
External USB2 200 GB drive with ntfs
External USB2 200 GB drive with ntfs

I currently am running Gentoo and Windows XP on this laptop.

I am accessing the ext3 partition from the laptop via the ext2 IFS from http://www.fs-driver.org/ without any major issues (although files larger than 2 GB cause Windows XP to bluescreen when creating them). I was setting up Captive for my NTFS drives and have run into problems mounting as a user (despite the user option in fstab). I've looked for assistance with, but nobody has posted about it, but suggested not using captive-ntfs and instead looking into ntfsprogs with write support.

My question is: What's the best way, with least possibility for data loss or corruption to access all 690 GB of data from Linux and Windows. Preferrably with a system that either provides journaling, or is in some other way safeguarded against crashes causing data loss (ie. preferrably not fat32). I'm at a loss at the moment, as all options seem to be risky or far too complex.

Any suggestions/ideas would be greatly appreciated.

-Jason

[brycenut]

I'm no expert on this, but have tried similar things. In my experience, captive is sloooow (700KB/s write speeds). I've never tried enabling write support with ntfsprogs. I also tried L-tools to access ext3 drives from Windows, and it worked well, but doesn't provide drive letters, and doesn't really support removable devices well. In short, I never found a good solution that didn't involve FAT32 for read/write exchange.

My final solution was to drop the native XP partition entirely and go pure Gentoo on my machines. I use VMWare for the one program (Visual Studio) that I still have to have on a regular basis. (I do use Codeweavers Crossover Office for a few programs, but only about 1-2x per month). With the latest VMWare, you can allow the guest operating system (Windows XP, etc) to mount external USB drives - no SATA support, AFAIK - rather than having Linux load the usb_storage driver. You can then drag & drop between VMWare shared folders on your Linux filesystem and the USB drives which can be formatted NTFS. A side benefit of doing it this way is that your drives are then easily plug & play on other Windows machines, and can always be mounted read-only under Linux machines without VMWare installed, so the data is always readable, at least.

I know VMWare is somewhat expensive, but for me it's been the only solution to this and a few other problems (a windows-only MP3 player for my wife that can be connected to VMWare's USB ports, for example). There is an academic version available, it's $100-120, if you're a student.

[jasonpf]

Thanks for your reply.

I use my Windows system for gaming and therefore am in it far too much. Since I don't really want to reboot to get into Linux to just browse the web, I use XP more than I'd like to, maybe 50% of the time. I just finished a captive mount script which fixes the issues I was having (I should have done this the right way, but I was being stubborn and decided to do a work-around). I haven't really used it yet, but I'll be using it MOSTLY for reading. I will be writing some things, but usually small files - text, maybe a few small files. Since my main documents drive is ext3 this should work ok for me despite the slowness.

Any other suggestions are of course still welcomed. I haven't commited 100% to captive-ntfs yet.

-Jason