partitioning ext hard drive for Linux and windows

[Droidriven]

I'm in the process of reinstalling Linux on my ext hard drive, I want to leave half of the drive for windows, after I create my Linux partitions during manual install, can't I make the rest of the drive a partition in fat32 and use it for windows?

[MrBob22]

By ext hard drive do you mean ext4 or external hard drive? Not sure why you would want to use an external hard drive to boot, so lets assume you want to partition your internal hard drive for linux and windows use. This can be done and dual booting is a common activity. Generally speaking, you probably want to install windows on your drive first. Windows needs to have an windows formatted drive in order to install. After you install windows, you can use a live dvd to install Linux on your drive, and the installer will shrink the drive so that you have a partition for both systems. There is a lot of material on this on the net since so many folks want dual boot, so you might want to read through some google searches on dual boot with linux (and read up on UEFI if you machine has that particular feature.) MrBob22 Good Luck~

[Droidriven]

By ext hard drive do you mean ext4 or external hard drive? Not sure why you would want to use an external hard drive to boot, so lets assume you want to partition your internal hard drive for linux and windows use. This can be done and dual booting is a common activity. Generally speaking, you probably want to install windows on your drive first. Windows needs to have an windows formatted drive in order to install. After you install windows, you can use a live dvd to install Linux on your drive, and the installer will shrink the drive so that you have a partition for both systems. There is a lot of material on this on the net since so many folks want dual boot, so you might want to read through some google searches on dual boot with linux (and read up on UEFI if you machine has that particular feature.) MrBob22 Good Luck~

By ext hard drive do you mean ext4 or external hard drive? Not sure why you would want to use an external hard drive to boot, so lets assume you want to partition your internal hard drive for linux and windows use. This can be done and dual booting is a common activity. Generally speaking, you probably want to install windows on your drive first. Windows needs to have an windows formatted drive in order to install. After you install windows, you can use a live dvd to install Linux on your drive, and the installer will shrink the drive so that you have a partition for both systems. There is a lot of material on this on the net since so many folks want dual boot, so you might want to read through some google searches on dual boot with linux (and read up on UEFI if you machine has that particular feature.) MrBob22 Good Luck~

No, you had it right, I'm trying to reinstall Linux on an external USB drive that already had Linux on it and now has disappeared so I'm replacing it, I wanted to leave half of the 2TB for windows to also be able to use for backup and storage. I've already had it set this way but its gone wacky. I was going to just wipe the whole drive over again but only half of it shows in windows and it won't mount at all in Linux so I'm reinstalling with a new partition table just to get it back where all of the drive is recognizable again in windows then I'll rewipe the drive and be back to having 2TB accessible. I've tried gparted but it gives me I/O errors saying that it is an unrecognized drive. It shows the whole two 2TB as unallocated space and it won't allow me to reformat the whole drive. I does however allow me to reset the partitions in the install from live CD.

[Mark Phelps]

can't I make the rest of the drive a partition in fat32 and use it for windows?

You can ... but versions of Windows newer than XP default to the NTFS filesystem -- which is also read/write supported by Linux. You would better formating it NTFS than FAT32.