2 operating systems, One place to store your data.

Apr 01

Yep, its April fools day. According to the headlines the Google homepage just crashed (see to believe), Ubuntu is going to become an RPM distro and several other stupid newsstories that only prove that you are a complete idiot if you believe them. So I’m not even going to bother with telling you that I just got an official MCSE-certification and am going to accept a position in Belgiums top Microsoft board of executives in a project to kill open source once and for all… nothing of the sorts !

I am however going to point you to a nice tool a friend of mine pointed me towards : EXT2 IFS for windows !

So here is the situation. you are running a dual boot scenario with both Windows and Linux on the same system. You would like to have your “documents” available in ‘both’ operating systems. Not just your “my documents” in Windows and your “home folder” in Linux. Well , its not very hard to do. The first alternative that you have is to have Ubuntu read the NTFS partition of your Windows XP machine (don’t work with Vista)  To do so go HERE. The downside is that this is not a very “fast” way to work. File-access is not very speedy and thats because they need to ‘reverse engineer’ the closed source standard of NTFS in order to get it working. Sure you can mount your NTFS partition in Linux , but why would you ?

The other alternative is to store all your data on your “linux system” and enable WINDOWS to read the Linux file format . you’ll need to install the tool called EXT2 IFS for windwows and this will let you read and write to your Ubuntu partition (download it HERE ) Once installed the program will ask you to assign a drive letter to the EXT2 partition of your Linux system and TADAAA , you’ll be able to access the files.

The next step is easy, Go to your mounted linux partion and look for the folder called /home/your-user-name ,  Next create a folder in there called “my documents” and remap your my documents folder to this very folder. This will transfer your data from your Windows system to your Linux system. That way you’ll be able to access your data using your ‘my documents’ shortcut on the desktop in Windows AND by going to the “my documents” folder in your homefolder when you are working in Linux.

Its THAT simple and it ain’t no April fools joke.

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