make /home as ntfs

[godsotherhand]

Can this be done? i have 3 partitions: Windows, and / with a separate /home for linux. But i want the /home partition to be shared with Windows, no point in having that one as ext4. Fat is out of the question, as i need files bigger than 4gb.

[veggen]

I see no reason for this not to work. Not sure how good idea it is*, but it should certainly work.

*As explained below, it's actually a terrible idea.

[remoulder]

it should certainly work

No it won't. NTFS doesn't understand linux filesystem permissions and vice-versa, so you can't have a home on an NTFS partition. What you can have is symlinks in your home resident on a linux FS, that point to data folders on an NTFS FS, but these should only be for things like documents, photos, etc, not configuration files and settings.

[godsotherhand]

so no way to have a /home partition that Windows can see, except using FAT32?

[eanfrid]

You should use a dedicated partition, not your /home. Then you will have no problem to format this one in NTFS in order to share it with Windows.

Using FAT on your /home will not work either since FAT is worse than NTFS and don't know anything about user permissions (it's all or nothing).

[veggen]

Ok, I'm maybe seriously misunderstanding things, but why can't you have your home on a non-POSIX file system? Everyone will have access to it, the OS won't be able to lock files in the expected way, the files will skip trash, the forgotten demons will escape their extra-dimensional prisons etc, but none of these reasons make it impossible to do so, they just make it a bad idea. I mean, this guy did it. Or am I still wrong?

[eanfrid]

It is not plainly impossible but some softwares won't work at all because they need to rule user permissions.

Many of the worst ideas are technically possible. Encouraging bad solutions is not really helping.

[veggen]

Encouraging? Not me.
(Edited my first post to reflect the non-encouraging tone)

[godsotherhand]

Using FAT on your /home will not work either since FAT is worse than NTFS and don't know anything about user permissions (it's all or nothing).

FAT doesnt work? then why is it a option in the installer? When i choose to format the /home partition (before installing Mint 13) it lets me choose fat and set it to /home ... I dont need anything fancy on there.. It just needs to store data. I aint no big company CEO, i dont need security on it, i dont care if X from country Y has access to the files because it a stupid choice of a file system. Im the only one using the PC.

Anyway, if any1 has an idea on how this could be done, please post. Windows is just for games, and i rarelly play games.


i followed this thread
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... on-830499/
But i didnt really understood that much..

[eanfrid]

From the Mint installer (denies install of / on FAT32, whatever you try):

Un système de fichiers fat32 ne peut pas être monté sur /home car il n'offre pas toutes les fonctionnalités d'un système de fichiers Unix. Vous devriez choisir un autre type de système de fichiers comme ext2.

which can be translated to

A fat32 file system cannot be mounted on /home since it does not offer all the functions of a Unix file system. You should choose another type of file system like ext2

[edwardr]

When I set up a dual boot machine I link my Linux and Windows Music, Pictures, Video etc folders together so that, for example, the Windows "My Documents/My Music" directory points to the same directory as the Mint "Music" directory. The Linux home folder needs to allow permissions etc., so I make the /home folder ext3 or ext4. Windows cannot read ext3 or ext4 partitions, but Linux can read Windows ntfs partitions, so I create symlinks to link the Mint Music, Pictures etc folders to their corresponding Windows folders.

First, I follow Fred's excellent post on automounting a Windows NTFS partition at boot and use it to automount the Windows "My Documents" folder:

viewtopic.php?f=42&t=22093


The I delete the Downloads, Music, Pictures etc. folders from my Mint home directory and replace them with links to the appropriate Windows folders by doing the following:

Open a terminal and type:

cd /home

then type:

rm -r Music

{this removes Music and all subfolders recursively. MAKE SURE THERE ARE NO FILES IN THERE YOU WANT TO KEEP BECAUSE THEY WILL BE GONE FOREVER!}

then type:

ln -s "/location/of/windows/My Music" ~/Music

{note the " " to handle spaces in the path name}


Repeat for Pictures, Videos etc.

Please be careful you don't delete any files you want to keep.

[godsotherhand]

This would work for the Download folder too, and any program that downloads a file, will download it there now? cool, thank you for your post.

[edwardr]

Yes, you can link the download folders. I'm not that familiar with Windows 7, but I believe it has a Downloads folder that you can link to, although Internet Explorer may not save all downloaded files there by default (it might try to put pictures in the pictures folder for example). Windows XP does not come with a Download folder, but if you use Firefox then Firefox will create a Download folder, or you can just create one yourself.

I'm not sure if Windows 7 has a Documents folder, XP does not, unless you count My Documents that has all the other folders inside it. I normally create a Documents folder inside My Documents to make the folder structures match between XP and Mint.

[godsotherhand]

I dont care about the Windows part of it.