cross compatibility

[perfectblue97]

I'm planning to install Suse on a PC with two HDs, both formatted to fat32.

I want to have one HD (C:\) with W98 (for propriatory systems) and one HD (D:\) with Suse on it.

My question, if I do the above, will windows be able to read files on D:\ and will Suse be able to read files on C:\, or will I be splitting my stourage resources in half.

[saikee]

Windows donot support Linux and will not read its files which should be in Ext2, Ext3 or Reiserfs format.

The standard route is to have a "neutral" partition that can be read and written by both sides and that would be a data partition in Fat32 format.

There is no point to read or write a system data from another system so leave them alone. Persistent tampering with the system files could only lead to damage of the systems.

Store your personal data in a neutral ground in a partition of its own, so that it would not have to go down with a system.

Linux can read a NTFS partition but officially doesn't write on it but there are experiemntal programs that write it.

As far as the systems are concerned you only need to keep them in separate partitions. There is no cross compatibility issue because I also have BSD and Solaris in the same box.

To run the first Linux you need two partitions; one about 5 to 10Gb for the Linux and a Swap partition twice the size of the physical memory in the PC.

Best way is to get hold of a Live CD and use its fdisk or cfdisk program to do the partitions first.

In Linux the same partitions in Windows are named by numbers and according to the position the disk is attached to the motherboard, in hda1, hda2, hdb1, hdb2 etc.

The 4 primary IDE devices have reserved names as hda, hdb, hdc and hdd.