[Cialug] USB enclosure for Linux ext3 drive

[David Champion]

Kendall Bailey wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org> wrote:
>
>   
>> So if the file system is owned by root then you may be able to read it
>> but you probably won't be able to write to it. Even if the icon shows
>> up on your desktop.
>>     
>
> But if I'm root on the box that has the drive plugged in, I can chown
> the whole file tree, right?
>   
That's one way to do it...

I have a couple of USB hard drives. One is a WD Passport 250gb, that 
came formatted as FAT32... but obviously not standard FAT32 since it's 
one big 250gb partition. It works fine under WinXP and Linux - with the 
caveat that Linux will complain about not being able to set file 
permissions when you copy files to it.

My other one is a el-cheapo "MadDog" enclosure I got at CompUSA that I 
put one of my old laptop HD's in. I usually have it formatted as Ext2 or 
ReiserFS and mount it natively on a Linux system. If you have it set up 
to mount as a user (i.e. "dave") on one system... if I mount it on 
another system, files will only show up as being owned by "dave" if the 
UID is the same on both boxes.

Depends on what you're planning to do... if you're just using it for 
portable file storage and plan to plug it into multiple machines 
including Windows, I'd format it FAT32 or NTFS. If you have specific 
needs to have a Linux partition on it, then use Ext2/3.

You could also have both types of partitions on the drive...

-dc