Introduction

The best way to share a partition with Linux is to create an EXT2 filesystem and use revision 0 (aka GOOD_OLD_REV) as the filesystem format. By using the GOOD_OLD_REV (revision 0) format you can avoid the dir_index and large_file issues encountered with DYNAMIC_REV (revision 1).

Example

Here is an example of how you can create, format and check an EXT2 filesystem using the Linux native tools:

# mkfs -t ext2 -r 0 /dev/hda3
# fsck -C -t ext2 /dev/hda3
# tune2fs -c 20 -i 6m -L Share /dev/hda3
# fsck -C -t ext2 /dev/hda3
# tune2fs -l /dev/hda3

If you want to use the revision 1 ext2 fs format it is possible but you need to format it like this:

# mke2fs -I 128 -L "Choose a name here" -O ^dir_index,^has_journal -v /dev/partition

(you can get mke2fs from the e2fsprogs package).

Partitions formatted this way are compatible with the windows and OS X ext2 drivers:

http://www.fs-driver.org/ http://ext2fsx.sourceforge.net/