I want to put up a dual boot freeBSD partition on my Win2Kpro machine but have NTFS. Is there anything I can do to make the existing files shareable?

You can read NTFS with Linux, just do not WRITE to an NTFS drive with Linux.

I switched everything to Fat32 and have no problem sharing files and folders

I understood that you cannot switch from ntfs to fat32...can you tell me how?

it is not possible to have two file systems operating on the same hard disk drive and taking into account that FAT 32 is an older file allocation table why do you really want to switch it anyway.

failing that just operate a machine with two individual hard drives and install an O/S on each one. the two hard drives will format according to the O/S file allocation table. You will be given an option when the P.C boots up as to which operating system you want to use. If you want to share files the easiest thing to do is save the file as a standard text (txt) file onto a removable medium i.e a CD/RW or floppy disk and then shut down that O/S and then boot into the other one and take the file off the removable medium. save it to the hard drive as whatever file you like. sorted

yes, I agree on not going backwards to fat32. but that is the file system on the unix/linux distros, no? I haven´t made the decision yet as to linux or unix, a techy that I trust told me that freeBSD is the best for someone that knows unix programming.

so, to recap, if I go with two HDs, which sounds reasonable, then when I´m in whatever unix I choose, I can at least read the second drive and transfer files to the other O/S?

that would be workable...

yes but only as long as you back the file up to the removable medium as a txt file

FreeBSD is just like Linux, in the respect that support is only stable in a read-only environment. You'll want to have some kind of FAT32 partition, or a network share, if you want to move data between the two OSes.

Hello,

It is possible to have two different file systems on the same physical hard drive -- any linux box with a swap partition has filesystem for the files, and another system for the swap data.

Or you can take a hard drive, and put a FAT32 partition on it, and an NTFS partition on it. They are two different file systems on the same physical drive.

You cannot put two file systems in the same partition however.

Christian

so how could i put two file systems on the same hard drive without any conflicts or problems.

speaking of which i have a something that i am not sure of myself. i have an IBM thinkpad laptop running WinXP pro. when i go to defrag the hard drive it shows that the file system is FAT 32. i though that Winxp used the other format of NTFS 5. if this is the case how on earth do i convert it. i dont have the origional disks.