Trying to get a partition shared between WinXP and FC3

[Leslie Katz]

At 10:06 PM 05/08/20, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> Leslie Katz wrote:
> > I'm not sure I've seen anything from the list yet with either my
> > or Benno's posts in it,
>
> This must be because you are not subscribed, as the posts did make
> it through, as you can see here:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2005-08/threads.html
>
> To subscribe follow the instructions on:
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-parted


I'm not sure exactly what's going on about my subscription, since I 
did get a confirmation of subscription before sending my initial post 
and, as I just confirmed by visiting the list, had asked to get the 
posts to the list. Maybe it's a time zone thing, since I'm in Australia.


> > I then restarted the computer, choosing Linux as the OS I wanted.
> > I next started Writer and tried to open "test.txt", which was
> > visible. It worked, but "read-only". I checked the file's
> > permissions and saw that ordinary users weren't permitted to
> > write to the file.
>
> Googling for "how to share partition between windows and linux"
> (without the quotes) popped up this:
> http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/partition-share-HOWTO.html
>
> It seems you need an option "umask=000" in your /etc/fstab, as shown
> here: http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/fstab.txt

I had the Park documents, as well as numerous others on the topic, 
but since every one of them is different, whether slightly or 
substantially, I thought I'd ask the list as well, hoping to get a 
definitive answer.


> > I didn't remount the partition before rebooting my computer,
> > thinking I could mount it manually after the re-boot
>
> That was perfectly allright, there is no need to remount before
> rebooting.  You can indeed mount the partition manually any time,
> even if /etc/fstab isn't correctly set up: by giving 'mount' all
> the necessary options directly.  See 'man mount' for that.
>
> > I would have preferred not to
> > have to figure out myself how to get things going again, but to
> > have that information in advance from the info page.
>
> Well, if you can write something up, concise and general, and post
> it here, your text might get included in a next version of parted.

Following are my proposed additions to the end of section 2.4.5 of 
the info page for parted v 1.6.15 (I have not checked the info page 
for later parted v(s), because I already had v 1.6.15 installed and 
so used it myself; I assume the section's similar to the current one):



"Please note the following:

1. if you want to use mkfs to change the file system of an existing 
mounted partition, it will be necessary for you to unmount that 
partition before you change its file system.

2. if there is an entry in the file "/etc/fstab" for the partition 
whose file system you have changed with mkfs, you should edit that 
file to reflect the change of the partition's file system before any 
re-boot. Otherwise, the re-boot may stop when /etc/fstab is sought to 
be implemented during it. Before editing your /etc/fstab file, make a 
backup of it.

3. If, before you change the partition's file system type, your 
/etc/fstab file was using a label for the partition and you have 
changed the partition's file system type to FAT32, it will be 
necessary for you, when editing your /etc/fstab file, to delete that 
label and substitute a reference to the partition by its device name.





One thing you may want to keep in mind: Google is half the Linux
> manual.  Especially when having difficulties.  :)
>
> Cheers, and enjoy!
>
> Benno


Thanks again, Benno, for your help about this. It's much nicer to 
have a shared hard drive partition that's significantly bigger than 
any of the flash drives I've been using thus far!

Leslie