Can RedHat Linux read the FAT32 filesystem?

Question

I have a My Book External Hard Drive made by Western Digital and it came from the factory formatted in HFS+ I want to use the external hard drive with my Linux Operating System computers (IBM laptops, Blades, Dell, etc...) as the Ultimate Goal. I have Windows computers as well and I'm currently using the windows Operating System to change the format of the My Book drive. Using the Linux OS computers to mount to the My Book has been impossible because the software that came with the My Book drive has "setup.exe" files in the format that cannot be read by the Linux OS. So I'm not sure if the Linux Computer can't use the hard drive because the File-System HFS+ on the external drive is the reason. So, the external drive has to be re-formatted into FAT32, or should it be re-formatted in NTFS because that is also as easy an option for the Windows computer to perform to the external My Book hard drive.

Answer 1

1. Yes. All distros can read the FAT32 file system.

2. You should use NTFS. FAT32 is highly inefficient for large hard drives. Vista willnot even install toa FAT32 partition.

3. ntfs-3g should be in the repository. The Linux kernel can also read NTFS partitions (but not write to them).

Answer 2

If your Linux has the latest 2.6 Kernel it can read and write NTFS

FAT32 is is able to be read and written to by all Linux because it is a very old format

Edit :

The latest kernel provides read and write to ntfs not only read

FUSE is built into the latest Linux Kernel following poster plz update

Quote from the following below

"FUSE is built in into every Linux kernel version 2.6.14 or above"



Edit:

NTFS is much better than FAT32 because it supports journalling and Access Control List

I would recommend partitioning it to NTFS

The reason Linux connot open exe file is because WINE is required for Windows API to work even then ome relatively new software may not be supported by WINE

One thing to note about NTFS si that whenever you remove it from Windows be sure to 'safely remove hardware' first

So the data on the journal will be update to the data on disk

so no data error will be present

If you do not do that Linux will complain that the disk was not unmounted cleanly the previous time and refuse to mount it

Check your kernel version > 2.6.14 by using the following command in terminal

$uname -a



Edit:

Yes there is 2 way to go about doing this either

a)Get ntfs-3g as a program install it and use the ntfs-3g to mount your drive

b) upgrade your kernel to the latest version so FUSE it supported and NTFS read write is enabled

http://www.redhat.com/support/resources/howto/kernel-upgrade/

Either way is fine but upgrading kernel is more risky some older software may break so i think you might just want to install ntfs-3g

Answer 3

Can Linux Read Ntfs

Answer 4

The kernel needs to have help for the record structures. when you're utilizing the kernel that comes with the help of default with the distro, its not likely that the seller would have protected fat/NTFS record equipment help with the kernel. you could acquire the kernel source and assemble it with help for interpreting/writing FAT32/NTFS record structures. From the configuration menu less than "record structures", you could favor to enable this.

Answer 5

if your Redhat has a 2.4.x or higher kernel you can get Full support for HFS Plus filesystems. downlaod the patch for the linux kernel here.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-hfsplus