Dualbootin' Goodness
So, I had this interesting idea for Zach post-reinstall. I wanted to have his data (minus recorded TV) stored on my old 120 GB hard drive on a partition next to my Linux slices. I wanted this to be readable and writable reliably (i.e., FAT32/vfat) by both Linux and Windows, and I wanted it to coexist as my My Documents directory.
So, I formatted the drive FAT32 and got into the “Administrative Tools” -> “Computer Management” section of the Control Panel (typing compmgmt.msc in the Run… dialog will also do the trick). If you go to Storage -> Disk Management, you see a nice colored partition map. If you double-click the FAT32 partition and go to “Change Drive Letter and Paths”, you can “mount” the drive into an empty NTFS folder on your main partition. So… if you empty out your My Documents folder you can map the drive to it. Conveniently enough, you can also give the drive a letter (two different “names”) so it can be accessed easily. This also helps to verify that the drive is also mounted (and that you’re not just writing to the “empty” NTFS folder).
It works well, and this way my MP3’s don’t take up space that TV needs. And, I can access my music seamlessly from Kubuntu.