[H-GEN] FAT32 HDD access

Jason McDonald jasonm at foxboro.com.au
Mon May 29 21:57:56 EDT 2000


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> What I want to do is install an extra 10GB HDD in my Linux box
> that can be accessed by the Win98SE machines on the LAN.
> I wanted to format it as FAT32 so that it can be swapped into
> a Win98SE machine (it's in a carrier) in the event of me trashing
> my Linux partition. (quite possible at this early learning stage!)
> The new 10GB drive will have data on it that gets used frequently
> during the day so I can't afford the downtime or the possibility of
> data loss in the event I muck things up. Does this make sense?

Here it is in four easy steps:

1. Format the new drive with whatever partitions you want.

2. Find a pre-conpiled kernel with MSDOS and VFAT filesystem support (most
distributions should provide a kernel that has these as loadable modules),
or compile a kernel of your own with these (see /usr/src/linux/README
for more info on compiling your own kernel).

3. Add an entry for each partition to your /etc/fstab file and create the 
mount points.  For example, if the new drive is the second IDE drive
(/dev/hdb) and you have two partitions on it, you might make mount points
/win1 and /win2 and you would add the following lines to /etc/fstab.

   /dev/hdb1    /win1     vfat     defaults   1    1
   /dev/hdb2    /win2     vfat     defaults   1    1

4. Reboot.


You could use NFS or Samba to share the drive on the local area
network (I prefer Samba).  See the NFS and Samba howto docs for
instructions.

Good luck,
J.


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