[mythtv-users] Multi-gigabyte shared r/w partitions

[Calvin Harrigan]

Josh White wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Calvin Harrigan 
> <charriglists at bellsouth.net <mailto:charriglists at bellsouth.net>> wrote:
> 
>     I've been running mythtv for at least 5 years now, I'm happy as a
>     clam with it.  Recently I became interested in renting movies online
>     via itunes/netflix/etc.  Unfortunately none of these run in linux,
>     so I installed windows XP on my mythtv box ( I know, the horror, the
>     hardware didn't even know what windows was until that day.).  Now I
>     have a dual boot machine that works quite well.  The problem is that
>     the OSes, swap, boot partitions are on smaller system drive while
>     the media is stored on a single partition 750GB EXT3 drive.  I'm
>     looking for a way for windows to r/w to the ext3 partition or at
>     least read without having linux run the file check every time I boot
>     into windows.  I've tried Ext2 IFS driver found at
>     http://www.fs-driver.org but that doesn't work because the inodes in
>     the ext3 partition is > 128 bytes.  I'm not willing/able to find
>     somewhere to store 500 gigs of data, reformat, and copy back.  I was
>     thinking that someone has had to come across such a scenario before
>     and hopefully found a solution.  Are there any other file systems
>     that I can use that is r/w from windows and linux?  FAT32 is
>     obviously not an option.
> 
>     Thanks
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> 
> 
> 
> I had a 500gb external drive where I used NTFS as the common file system 
> between Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux & MacOS X, using the NTFS3g drivers on 
> the Mac & Linux boxes.  It seemed to work well enough; transfer speeds 
> were reasonable, and I never lost data.  Another solution (though more 
> hardware intensive) may be to build a NAS type of machine and use Samba 
> to connect from your media machine, regardless of the OS your running, 
> then the file system on the drive is irrelevant. 
> 
> Good luck
> 
> Josh
> 
> 
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I've considered the NAS route even if in a more indirect manner.
I thought of putting a VM on the windows box that runs a stripped down 
version of linux with samba and have windows r/w to the share and 
consequently to the hard drive, but what a way to go.  I thought about 
the ntfs-3g route as well, but seeing since linux will be the dominant 
use of the box, I don't want to format the drive to NTFS.  I'm not sure, 
but I don't think the ntfs drivers would take well to reading an hd 
stream while write two other HD streams and an SD stream simultaneously.


Thanks