[nflug] Creating an NTFS partition on a USB drive

[Joe]

Questions:
How do I create an NTFS partition on a usb drive that Windoze XP can
read and write?

How do I mount it in Linux (e.g.  with ntfs-3g)?

Is there something special I have to do to copy back all the stuff from
my Linux backup (forward slashes to backward ones)?

Background:

I've got a new 120GB usb drive for my notebook.  I want to create two
partitions on it.  1) 50GB NTFS for Windows XP to use, 2) 70GB ext3 for
Linux.

I worked on this for several hours and reviewed my nflug mail list archive.
I created the two partitions using cfdisk using 86 -NTFS Volume Set for
1) and ext3 for 2). (Linux sees them as /media/sdb1 and sdb2).  (There
was also an 87 option with the same name.)

Everything looked like it worked fine and I copied some files from
Windoze C: to the new D:   and (dumb!) I deleted them from C: .

When I rebooted later, Windoze couldn't see anything on D: and couldn't
write to it.  I booted back into Linux and the files were all there.  I
copied everything into a new directory under my $HOME for backup and
then did a QTParted  and set the first partition to NTFS.

Now, I tried to copy the backup into it (still in Linux) and it won't write.
Somewhere along the line (in Windoze), I saw something about the
partition being "raw".  Do I have to format it after fdisking it like in
Windoze?

I have ntfs-3g installed, but don't know how to invoke it for a usb
partition.  It's /dev/sdb1 now, but if I plug in a thumb drive first,
that will be sdb1 and the partition will have a different name.

I tried sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1  and that seemed to
work without an error, but I still couldn't write to it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Joe




_______________________________________________
nflug mailing list
nflug at nflug.org
http://www.nflug.org/mailman/listinfo/nflug