I did something wrong with my dual-OS PC (XP Pro and Ubuntu) and it now only works when booting from an Ubuntu Live CD (8.04 LTS).
I am backing up my data to an external HDD for reinstalling everying. I am not worried about the Linux part of my data because the external HDD is formatted in ext3, the file system Ubuntu operates on.
But what about the Windows part of my data? Does Linux (the live CD) properly copy NTFS files into an ext3 HDD? And then does Linux (this time, the newly installed Linux system on PC) properly copy them back to the NTFS partition?
I know I am asking a very simple question. I am sorry if I appear to ask someone to do my homework but I cannot experiment myself now.
Thanks you all in advance!
Edit:
Is it perhaps better to format the external HDD in fat32?
As amemus said, fat32 would be better for the external HDD. Even though it's Microsoft, fat32 is still, by far, the most supported HDD format.
That said, what you said SHOULD work, given you use a new-ish distro of linux with new packages.
Ubuntu 8.04 is very old these days, but I believe it had good support for NTFS read (using the old ntfs driver). It will correctly copy your Windows files to the ext3 external hard drive, plus or minus some attributes/permissions which have no equivalent in ext3.
Newer Ubuntu releases have full NTFS read/write support via the ntfs-3g driver which I have found to work very well.
Sidenote: I have found NTFS is a reasonably good filesystem for external hard drives - it works well for Windows and recent Linux computers, and it's technically superior to FAT32. The only issue is if you have to interact with Apple OSX, which still doesn't understand NTFS. (You can make OSX understand NTFS with a liberal application of FUSE and ntfs-3g, but it's not nice.)
Note: This is probably the wrong Stack Exchange - StackOverflow is for programming questions. Maybe the Ubuntu stackexchange would have been better?
Ubuntu shouldn't have a problem reading from NTFS.
Writing to NTFS used to be very difficult, but its gotten a lot better (a simple google search turns up lots of results)
As long as you aren't working with large (~4GB) files, FAT32 will be easier to work with across lots of different platforms.
Related
When reading the WSL documentation, it is stated that:
"Unlike our practice with trying to exclusively install programs and software on Ubuntu, our files and folders need to live exclusively on the Windows FS [...] Windows and Windows Apps can only read and write Windows files, and VSCode will be making our changes."
I understand the reasoning behind this and indeed, if one uses VSCode for example, it all makes sense. But my question is:
Is there any real reason why you couldn't keep your files (i.e. scripts) on the WSL filesystem itself? More specifically, if you don't ever intend to use the Windows filesystem (i.e you won't ever need a GUI or else), is there any sense in placing the files in the Windows FS?
Obviously you need to make sure you backup your data (GitHub or else) but aside from that, is there any downside? I guess what I'm saying is: can I use WSL like a VM? Can I keep BOTH software AND scripts all in WSL, separate from the Windows filesystem?
PS: The reason for avoiding a VM in this context is because I have a low spec laptop which has struggled a lot in the past with VMs (slow, not enough RAM), and so far, WSL seems be running much more smoothly.
Thanks
The simple answer is yes, you can use WSL as if it were a VM. WSL is for the most part fully-fledged Linux, and you can use Linux as your primary operating system, ignoring the fact you need to start it from within Windows. I haven't tried WSL 2, but it's said to be implemented as a fast VM, which is exactly what you ask for. (Further, the lack of GUIs can be mitigated using built in support for sending X data over SSH to the Windows half of your computer, and display it with an X Server. If I remember correctly, these two articles got me most of my way there.)
However, if you want to get pedantic, you can't store any files separate from your Windows filesystem on WSL 1. If you run e.g. Ubuntu, your Linux filesystem is instead always contained within %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu18.04onWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState, so it'll technically not be separate. I can't test WSL 2, but according to this article, WSL 2 also stores its data in that folder, just as a single VDHX image. Presumably every WSL distro stores its data on the Windows filesystem.
Warning: Do not access the files themselves in your Linux filesystem within AppData using Windows tools, or you run a high risk of corrupting those files.
Yes, you can, and only place files in the Windows filesystem if you want to share them with Windows programs. Moreover, in Windows 1903 you don't need to place files in Windows filesystem to share them with Windows Programs, they can access them.
In WSL2 they encourage you to keep everything in WSL filesystem to take advantage of the filesystem's performance improve.
So, yes you can and you should.
Is there anyway to access files from usb without mounting it (in a terminal)?
copying or accessing files without mounting it!!
First of all: I think it would be better to post this question on "superuser.com", not on "stackoverflow.com" because this is a question about usage of Linux, not about programming for Linux.
In the 1990s there was a tool which allowed you to read FAT-formatted media (floppys and hard disk partitions) under Linux.
The tool was intended for older Linux versions that did not have FAT file system support.
Because today all Linux versions have FAT file system support I think that tool is no longer maintained however the source codes should still be available somewhere!
FAT32 did not exist, yet, the time when this tool was used so the tool only supported FAT12 and FAT16.
To access the media "root" rights are required in any case.
I'm running embedded Linux (Debian on ARM/X86_64). Since it is very much like a full OS, with some hardware differential and a different platform, you may consider it as a regular machine. So, this will be used in the robotics field where the computer will ALWAYS be hard reset by turning off power. It would disqualify me to use a UPS so I would need to make the system infallible.
I'm running some processor-intensive tasks, like OpenCV and OpenNI and OpenKinect. How do I use an uber-powerful filesystem, like ZFS to mirror the entire disk on the SSD for error correction? Does ZFS perform well in Linux? I'm still kinda a newbie in Linux so I don't understand it's internal workings.
My list of possible platforms are:
--Debian#RaspberryPi
--kUbuntu#ODROID-X2
--Ubuntu#PandaBoard
--Ubuntu#NUC-i3/5.
Also, how can I make sure the filesystem doesn't get damaged during reset? I need the computer to start in good time, A.K.A, <3 minutes for the competition.
I will probably be using a 32GB SSD, so I guess a 16GB partition mirrored 2x works or 12 # 3x. I only need to get an OpenCV install working because the code will be downloaded from a SAMBA NFS automatically!
Thanks for your help and good luck ;)!
ZFS is not suited for low memory systems. It do perform well on system with 4GB of RAM and more.
does somebody know, if windows and linux versions are compatible?
I need to know because I need to share the disk where my local reposities are between linux and win, which runs in virtualBox on the linux pc.
I develop on linux, but I need to use git on windows when I work remote (because of a VPN issue). Another option would be to always use git from windows, but I prefer not to start vbox.
Has somebody done this? I suppose it could be a bit risky, or would it be OK to rely on the versions to be 100% compatible. I would not like to have my repository corruptet...
Cheers Henning
Yes, as long as you're concerned about the database format they are compatible. Moreover, such compatibility is required even for "non-native" solutions like the JGit or libgit2 libraries.
I can only see two possible problems:
From time to time Git might change behaviour in a way not compatible with some of its past versions (but very rarely and with bold warnings in release notes documents long before the change is made).
So find out what versions you're running (git --version) in both worlds and if there's a major difference between them (in the X number of 1.X.Y version) consider reading the changelog for the one which has a greater X for possible gotchas.
Potential filesystem issues: these days you can mount an NTFS volume R/W when running a recent Linux kernel, and same goes about Ext2 (but not Ext3 and certainly not Ext4) on Windows but you might, in theory, accidently hit some problem with these drivers — of course, they haven't received that much love their native variants have.
I have both linux and windows installed on my pc. when I make some programs in lex and yacc (when working on linux)and store all the files in a folder ,they are corrupted If I use windows for some time. for example 3 days back after storing all the files( xyz.l , a.out ) I switched to windows for some other work after rebooting my pc. after 3 days when I again open that folder(while using linux) a.out was converted into an image and when I double clicked on it, an image opened. the image was same which I downloaded 2 days back while working on windows but I stored in some other folder. so does the memory space used for storage for linux and windows overlap? if not what could be the reasons? It has happened 2 times. and really I have to recode all my programs . I am not able to understand why?
It is not supposed to overlap.This sounds like a configuration problem , where windows and linux are configured to mount the same partition.
Check the file /etc/fstab (under linux) and find out whether this is true.You can try making files in various places and observe if they can be found on the other os.
I don't know how your partitioning looks like, but I guess that it is set up in a way that both OS have read/write access to all partitions, or at least windows has read/write access to the Linux partition.
Is your linux partition a FAT32 partition? You should set it to read only in windows, but I'm not sure how to do this.
Do you use hibernate on the windows side? Windows can get confused if data changes while it is asleep, and this might be the cause of the problems.