How to share the NDAS harddisk on FAT file system

Please note that FAT file system doesn't have the journalling feature. So it is error-prone on network file system environment.

We recommend you to use the file systems that has the journalling feature such as NTFS, ext3, and GFS.

But still, the FAT file system is only file system in the world to read and write the data from Microsoft Windows and Linux OS until the NTFS write feature of the linux driver becomes stable unless you are willing to buy the commercial linux NTFS driver.

Note: The write permission can be obtained as following.

1. Share write in MS Windows and read-only from linux
2. Exclusive write in linux and read-only from MS Windows

1. Format

• You should format the file system from Microsoft Windows
• You can format the FAT32 file system up to 32GBytes size on Microsoft Windows.
• If you format the file system from Linux, some versions of Microsoft Windows will not recognize the file system as 'healthy'

2. Mount

mount -t vfat /dev/ndas-xxxxxxp1 /mnt/your-mounting-path

Please note that the old version of 'mount' command tries to mount the file system with 'msdos' first if no file system type given. then you can't use the long filename. In such a case, umount then mount with '-t vfat' option.

3. Share the FAT32 parttion of which size is over 32 Gbytes

Microsoft Windows XP itself supports the FAT32 file system over 32 GBytes.
Just you can't format the FAT32 file system of which size exceeds 32 GBytes from Microsoft Windows XP.

Here is the tip to share the FAT32 between Windows and Linux.

1. Format the partition as fat32 in linux

   mkfs -t vfat /dev/ndas-00112345:0p1 
   

2. disable the slot

   ndasadmin disable -s 1
   

3. Mount write-read mode from MS Windows
4. Open the disk management console from MS Windows. type the command at [Start]-[Run]

   diskmgmt.msc 
   

5. A dialog will ask you if you initialize the disk(NDAS harddisk), then say yes.
6. Assign a driver letter for the fat32 partition.