On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 18:32 +0200, Duncan Lithgow wrote: <snip> > >>> > >>> i have winxp home and core three installed on my laptop as dual boot; > >>> and i frequently switch from one into another and vice versa using > >>> hibernate. > >>> > >>> so i frequently hibernate my windows, then boot into linux, and then > >>> hibernate linux, and then resume into windows, and so on that the > >>> cycle repeated several times a day until i rebooted them... > >>> > >>> my problem is, i want both operating systems to access (read/write) > >>> the same partition (let's call it D: or /dev/hda9, the point is they > >>> are the same). but as i have experienced, this will corrupt my data at > >>> the partition when i switched operating system. > >>> > >>> to make things more clearly, the case is, i'm using thunderbird e-mail > >>> client both at windows and linux. i stored windows thunderbird mail > >>> folder to D:\mails and i stored linux thunderbird mail folder to > >>> /dev/hda9/mails. when i receive new mails from linux thunderbird, all > >>> seems okay. but when i hibernate my linux and switched into windows, > >>> thunderbird windows complains there is a file corrupt and suggests me > >>> to run chkdsk utility. and you can guess, chkdsk truncated my inbox > >>> and my mails are gone. > >>> > >>> i realized that sharing a partition for 2 OS is a bad practice. but is > >>> there really no solution? how about disabling write-cache on both OS? > >>> is it possible to "disable write-cache just for selected partition" ? > >>> how to do that in fedora? > >>> > >>> thank you for any solution, opinion, or idea. > >>> > >> > >> > > > <snip> > > > I've had this working for a while but it gave me all sorts of headaches. > I could swear i read an article about it on mozillazine - but now I > can't find it. There are lots of other things that come up about it > though. Have you tried a search before asking? > > Duncan > To be honest, I would be surprised if this ever worked. I think, you are correct in your assumption that the primary issue is a caching issue. But it's not just the "write-cache". There is a read-cache. How does the "hibernating" operating system know that a change has been made to one of the "drives/partitions"? These operating systems and their interactions with the hard disk make a HUGE ASSUMPTION - that they are the only one accessing the disk/partition/filesystem. This is why clustering is not a slam dunk and requires a different filesystem. What you would need to do is modify the "hibernate" scripts to drop/umount or something the "shared" filesystem and the "wakeup" scripts to pickup/mount or something the "shared" filesystem. This way, only one operating system has the partition/filesystem open at a time and life returns to sanity.... HTH, --Rob
