On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 08:31 -0400, James Pifer wrote: > I have 160 gig hard disk installed in a USB 2 enclosure. > > What is the best file system to put on it? > > It would be nice to be able to plug it into both Linux and Windows > machines. Obviously NTFS is not an option. Possibly with captive, as mentioned elsewhere. Have not tried it myself - I only use the read-only kernel module for NTFS. > Windows can't read linux drives. Well, that's not quite true. Google "windows ext3"... http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/ext2.html http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm > So what does that leave me with? > > Linux is my primary choice, so I put ext3 on it using qtparted. > > When I plug it into my laptop, the light on the usb enclosure flashes, > but I don't see anything under /media. Is there any way to force a > refresh? /etc/fstab has this: > /dev/sdb1 /media/usbdisk ext3 > pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0 > > Once I get that working, how do I deal with permissions since my userid > will not be able to write to it? Should I give my userid ownership of > /media/usbdisk? Will those permissions "stick" when I remove and plug > the drive in again? If using ext3, should be able to deal with permissions like any other filesystem. If using VFAT, then mounting as a user makes everything owned as that user if the fstab entries and /media/* are automagically created correctly as they are for my external USB/FireWire VFAT disks and USB keys. Not sure why your experience differs, but then USB support has always been a bit problematic. Phil
