[plug] File-systems and Windows

[Craig Ringer]

> Apart from the pathos of it all - the point I really want to make is this:
> it might be much safer to select FAT32 as your file system when and if
> loading WinXP, and as someone else said, that can be read and written to by
> Linux as well.

Maybe... but NTFS is a _lot_ more robust. I frequently see problems with 
directory corruption on fat32, and a very common issue with misreported 
free space too. Not nice. I certainly wouldn't want to have the boot 
volume on fat32, being inclined to keep a separate fat32 partition for 
data interchange instead if I had to.

Of course, I never keep any data of value on any windows install on my 
systems, so I'm quite happy to overwrite them with a fresh disk image 
_when_ they die. Got a DAT tape sitting on my desk now, labeled "laptop 
win2k clean image" :-) which I can DD over the network to my laptop's 
win2k partition if win2k dies. A very nice command for those of you with 
laptops (limited storage, no DAT etc) and desktops with big drives or 
tape drives:

If windows is on hda:

dd if=/dev/hda | ssh desktop-pc-hostname dd of=laptop_win_disk.img

In other words, for those who didn't already know, you can pipe data 
(any data, binary not a problem) through an ssh connection from stdin on 
one end to stdout on the other.

-- 
Craig Ringer
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