Mount C:\Users as a Fat32 Partition

[redemblem101]

Hi guys, I'm planning on placing my C:\Users folder on a separate partition of my HDD. I know the general scheme of things would be to create the separate parition, we'll call it D:\. and then robocopy everything from C:\Users to D:\ and delete the contents of C:\Users before mounting D:\Users.

Does anyone have any clue what to do if I want D:\ to be a FAT32 partition? Will I run into trouble because of permissions from the NTFS partition that \Users originally resided on?

 

[Lemur]

Just curious, why would you want FAT32?

 

[redemblem101]

It's a shared partition between multiple OSes.

Anyway, I was wondering if perhaps a superior solution may be to merely symbolically link only the directories inside of C:\Users\xxxxx to new directories on the separate drive. So I could point Documents, Pictures, and Music to the new partition and just leave all the AppData and other stuff in-tact on C:\Users

 

[Petey7]

FAT32 is limited in terms of how large a file can be and is notorious for how badly fragmented the partitions become. So, as my colleague ask, is their a particular reason you want FAT32, or are you just naturally curious.

 

[redemblem101]

like I said above, I have multiple OSes.

It's a shared partition between multiple OSes.

Anyway, I was wondering if perhaps a superior solution may be to merely symbolically link only the directories inside of C:\Users\xxxxx to new directories on the separate drive. So I could point Documents, Pictures, and Music to the new partition and just leave all the AppData and other stuff in-tact on C:\Users

Any suggestions?

 

[Petey7]

Is one of the OSes Windows 98 or older? If not, they should be able to read NTFS fine.

 

[redemblem101]

No, the other OSes are merely GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. I mostly concerned for getting the linux OS working with the new partition. I can use an open source NTFS driver for the linux OS, but I would rather just use FAT32.

I'm not concerned about the 4GB file size limit and the fragmentation is really going to be a problem in NTFS anyway.

 

[Petey7]

What Linix OS? Most of them can read NTFS fine. I'm not sure about BSD, but I would be surprised if it couldn't.

 

[redemblem101]

What Linix OS? Most of them can read NTFS fine. I'm not sure about BSD, but I would be surprised if it couldn't.

Debian. Yeah, I can use the open source implementation, but I mostly just don't want to for various reasons. I did, however, find an exfat driver that is hosted on Google Code. I plan to use that in lieu of FAT32 or NTFS.

 

[Barman58]

To answer your question directly the symbolic link will work and is in fact built into win7 under the guise of the location tab on the properties sheet for the user data type folders (documents, pictures, Etc.).

One major issue you may have to deal with ts that you will not have any ACL, (permissions), controls as this is unsupported in Fat32 format drives.

If you leave the system stuff like the Apps filder tree on C: everything should work fine

 

[redemblem101]

Thanks, Barman58.

I am decidedly going to leave everything other than documents, music, videos, and downloads in C:\Users. I think that this is the best way to get around the permissions problem. As for the incapabilities of FAT32 (drive errors, file limit size, etc.) I'm going to use the open source driver implementation of EXFAT that I have found on Google Code. It's hosted here
exfat - Project Hosting on Google Code

If anyone else wishes to do this, they can compile the FUSE implementation from source for their system with the following code:

svn co http://exfat.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ exfat-read-only
cd exfat-read-only
scons
sudo scons install

Then edit the FSTAB to mount the "exfat-fuse" device at whichever mountpoint you like

Of course, you don't have to use scons if you don't like good stuff to happen automagically.

Cheers.

 

[Dark Nova Gamer]

I just need to add to to this thread that as of Linux Kernel 2.6.xx + NTFS read/write support is fully implemented. All Ubuntu releases (8.04 -> 10.10) have this implemented with no issue, and since Ubuntu is based off of Debian, it to should have no issues with this.