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Page updated
22-Jul-2003

My PC

I'm running a Dell 4400 with 1.8 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM and two 40 GB disks. I have set it up to be dual-boot Windows XP and Red Hat distribution of Linux (9 for the moment). I installed it with GRUB as the boot loader in the MBR of the first disk. When you do that it will only boot Linux afterwards. I furthermore wanted a FAT32 disk to be shared between Windows XP and Linux allowing me to pass files back and forth between the two systems. I installed first XP on the first disk and left some space (2GB) unformatted (as raw disk). Then I installed Linux and used Disk Druid to format that partition as VFAT and mount it at /home/share

Booting the machine in Linux I had to edit the /boot/grub/grub.conf file to enable it to boot both Linux and Windows. Below you se my edited grub.conf (added the last five lines). If the paragraph below is messy it's because your browser does not understand the CSS: "white-space: pre;" declaration. Pick up the text version

# grub.conf generated by anaconda # # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making # changes to this file # NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that # all kernel and initrd paths are relative to # /boot/, eg. root (hd1,0) # kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hdb2 # initrd /initrd-version.img #boot=/dev/hda default=0 timeout=10 splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz title Red Hat Linux 9 (2.4.20-19.9) root (hd1,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-19.9 ro root=LABEL=/ initrd /initrd-2.4.20-19.9.img title Windows XP Professional unhide (hd0,1) rootnoverify (hd0,0) chainloader +1 makeactive

When you mount the FAT32 filesystem in Linux it is owned by root. FAT32 does not allow you to set file permissions the way you do with ext3 so you have to set the permissions at mount time. If you don’t, the filesystem will only be writeable by root. You have to decide for yourself what kind of access you want. I changed the mount permissions the way you see below in my /etc/fstab file (the line with vfat as type). If the paragraph below is messy it's because your browser does not understand the CSS: "white-space: pre;" declaration. Pick up the text version

# /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # <filesystem> <mountpoint> <type> <options>  <dump> <pass> LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1 LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2 none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hda2 /home/share vfat gid=100,umask=002 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 LABEL=/var /var ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdb3 swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

Here gid=100 is the group ID for "users" and the users you want to give write access to /home/share must be members of this group. The others can only read.

Good luck!