If you know anything about file systems, you know FAT32 is one of the really awful ones created by Microsoft. However, I use it because I use thumb drives. In fact, I don't do any of my work on my computer's internal hard drive. I have thumb drives with specific purposes. For each of those I have a backup thumb drive that I keep in sync with FreeFileSyc. It's a good system that works for me. I do it this way because I work on different computers and it's easy to just plug in a thumb drive and start working.
However, these thumb drives come with Microsoft's dreadful FAT32 file system. That inefficient thing was one of the reasons why earlier versions of Windows were so unstable. I've begrudgingly continued using FAT32 on thumb drives because sometimes I still have to work in Windows. Both *buntu and Windows read FAT32 just fine. However, I have been experiencing FAT32's trashy nature a lot. Numerous times folder on the thumb drive gets its files/file names all scrambled and it becomes impossible to go in and edit anything. Of course, that's what backups are for. I've been just going into Gparted and reformatting the drive and then restoring the backup. It's getting annoying how often I have to do that. Today, my 16 GB Lexar thumb drive had a folder so trashed that Gparted could not even read the drive. I sat there waiting an eternity for that normally reliable app to read the stupid drive. I finally had to boot to Windows 7 (where I am now) and format the thing with the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. It's working, but it's taking a LONG time. (Btw, the trashing of this thumb drive happened after working in Windows, not Kubuntu.)
I'm thinking of junking any use of FAT32 and using ext2 instead. I found these utilities that will let Windows read ext2, 3, and 4:
http://www.howtogeek.com/112888/3-wa...-from-windows/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/
However, I like the fact that when I'm in Windows, Windows cannot access my Linux hard drive at all. That's why I'm wondering if I can use these utilities to make all my thumb drives ext2 ones and then give Windows the ability to access ext2 drives, but not ext3 or ext4. Has anyone used such a utility and would my plan work?
Another option would be to use Microsoft's other prominent file system, NTFS. It's better than FAT32, but it's still pretty crappy. The other issue with that is file permissions can become a major hassle. If you've been working with an NTFS thumb drive on one PC and go to work on another, you have to take ownership of the files or you can't use them on the other computer. Would I run across the same problem if I used ext2? I guess I could write some kind of script that takes ownership of all files if I had to, though that would be a lot of trouble.
In any event, if anyone has used any of these ext2,3,4 file utilities for Windows, I would be interested in how they worked for you.
However, these thumb drives come with Microsoft's dreadful FAT32 file system. That inefficient thing was one of the reasons why earlier versions of Windows were so unstable. I've begrudgingly continued using FAT32 on thumb drives because sometimes I still have to work in Windows. Both *buntu and Windows read FAT32 just fine. However, I have been experiencing FAT32's trashy nature a lot. Numerous times folder on the thumb drive gets its files/file names all scrambled and it becomes impossible to go in and edit anything. Of course, that's what backups are for. I've been just going into Gparted and reformatting the drive and then restoring the backup. It's getting annoying how often I have to do that. Today, my 16 GB Lexar thumb drive had a folder so trashed that Gparted could not even read the drive. I sat there waiting an eternity for that normally reliable app to read the stupid drive. I finally had to boot to Windows 7 (where I am now) and format the thing with the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. It's working, but it's taking a LONG time. (Btw, the trashing of this thumb drive happened after working in Windows, not Kubuntu.)
I'm thinking of junking any use of FAT32 and using ext2 instead. I found these utilities that will let Windows read ext2, 3, and 4:
http://www.howtogeek.com/112888/3-wa...-from-windows/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/
However, I like the fact that when I'm in Windows, Windows cannot access my Linux hard drive at all. That's why I'm wondering if I can use these utilities to make all my thumb drives ext2 ones and then give Windows the ability to access ext2 drives, but not ext3 or ext4. Has anyone used such a utility and would my plan work?
Another option would be to use Microsoft's other prominent file system, NTFS. It's better than FAT32, but it's still pretty crappy. The other issue with that is file permissions can become a major hassle. If you've been working with an NTFS thumb drive on one PC and go to work on another, you have to take ownership of the files or you can't use them on the other computer. Would I run across the same problem if I used ext2? I guess I could write some kind of script that takes ownership of all files if I had to, though that would be a lot of trouble.
In any event, if anyone has used any of these ext2,3,4 file utilities for Windows, I would be interested in how they worked for you.
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