USB unplug / disk format in Linux

I tried Fedora on my desktop and notebook. It satisfies most of my needs, with the only problems:

1) USB unplug/plug fails much more frequently than Windows. Is this peculiar to Fedora?

2) disk format. is it possible to run/install Linux purely on NTFS? I find having my hard drive in ext instead of NTFS risky, when in case the system crashes, I can't take its drive and connect to my Windows desktop.

Thanks.

 

Any specific devices? I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 here. No problem with plugging and unplugging USB devices.

Er... what? What you ask is probably doable in theory but it is preferable to keep Windows and Linux on different partitions. Why not have Linux in ext3, then? When it comes to robustness, I see no benefit at all to try to put everything on an NTFS partition.

 

I had issues with usb flashdrive/hdd sometimes --- it doesn't happen all the time, but once it happens, it's very tedious --- had to go around the different logged-in accounts to try to eject---sometimes still failure --then had to do commandline as su. What's more, occassionally, an unplug failure will carry over to prevent future PnP.

When I talked about NTFS, I was thinking a bit against ext3 because it's not readable by Windows ---- any of those particular ext3 reading tools in Windows you feel very reliable and comfortable using?

Thanks!

 

Err...you could always try another distro like Ubuntu, I don't use Fedora but I have no problems in Ubuntu with ejecting my hard drive, but anyway it's usually safe in linux(unless you know your using the drive) to just unplug it, unlike windows.

NTFS is handled by a userland tool, it's not in the kernel, so installing it to an NTFS drive won't work at all. One way involves having Windows installed and using Wubi, which creates a virtual drive, but this is a huge performance hit and if windows goes down, it takes linux with it.

 

I've always used explore2fs in Windows and never had any problem with it. It is made for ext2 but it will read clean ext3 partitions without any problem.

It has been a while since I've read any Linux stuff from Windows though because now I use LVM and encryption. Last time I checked (1.5 years ago) I found nothing that I could use or wanted to use.

 

Would you recommend http://www.fs-driver.org/ over other ext2windows tools, since this seems to support both read/write and work on the same level as the drivers supporting the native ntfs for windows~

 

Well, I can't recommend anything I have not used myself. I see not obvious red flags against it though.

 

Thanks for all the suggestion.

I was surprised to hear that in Ubuntu one can unplug a usb drive without unmounting it first --- doing that in Fedora will give big headache when I tried to plug anything into that usb port again. ~

 

I haven't used Fedora, but can't you use the umount command in the terminal to 'unmount' that drive even if you have already unplugged it?