File system for external hard drive?

Potentially stupid question.

Buying a HD and external enclosure. I use Ubuntu/Win2k on one computer and WinXP on the other.

I should be formatting the HD as a FAT32 drive if I want it to work with everything, right?

Yeah

Isn't there some bothersome 6gb filesize restriction on FAT32 drives? In case of a badly-made ghost file or something. Or if you try to install that Tiger OSX image onto a PC.

>>3
4 gigabytes actually; and that's a filesystem limitation, mind you.
No single file can exceed that size on a drive/partition formatted in FAT32.

Format it in ext3 and check out this Explorer extension.

http://www.fs-driver.org

^ I'll vouch for that, better to use a journaled filesystem that isn't dog slow or limited by a 4G max file size.

OP here. Thanks for the replies.

Would there be any problem with partioning the drive with, say, 199gb of EXT3 and 1gb of FAT32, so I could install the fs-driver on a new computer or quickly install some spyware fix or something? Would all of the major OSes notice this and act as if it's two drives?

Also, is EXT3 reliable? I seem to remembe FAT32 sucking back in the Win98 days, and NTFS now seeming much more stable - is EXT3 nice and trustworthy?

>>7
Appending myself, sorry - the driver notes a lack of being able to defrag the drive. Important?

>>8
you don't have do defragment a ext3 filesystem, because it doesn't get fragmented anyway unless its completely filled up. in that case defragmenting isn't possible anyway.

>>9 here.
i thought the driver is for ext3, but it's for ext2. it doesn't really matter because its all backwards compatible. ext3 is just a ext2 with journaling, so you don't have do defragment ext2 either.

>>7 (i feel like to answer ;)
yes, its possible to use two partitions and it'll show up as two drives. well, just windows will tell you that there are two drives, but it'll be usable on all major platforms.
and yes, ext2/3 is *very* reliable and FAST. the driver doesn't support journaling (from ext3) though, but it's not a too big disadvantage.

>>10
Thanks!

if you don't use ext3 BE SURE YOU DISMOUNT BEFORE YOU SWITCH IT OFF otherwise you'll be fscking it.

>>12
means you have to select "none" as drive in the driver-sw that comes with the driver. it may sound like an disadvantage, but in fact it makes sure, that the data is intact.