Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Triple Booting with Shared Documents on exFat

I reinstalled my AOD150 netbook to have triple boot with an exFat shared data partition... (20gb each OS, 100gb Data)

First of all... exFat support on Linux is in beta, so don't blame me if this damages your computer, or data loss!

First, we set up our directories in Data to contain the ones we want to link... (Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Videos, and Music are the ones I created)

And now, linking in windows 7.

Open a command prompt, and in C:\Users\(username)\, do an "rd /S Documents" or which ever folders you want to link.

Next, use the command "mklink /J Documents D:\Documents" to create the link!

After you removed and linked all the folders, you're done!

Next we'll link in OSX... exFat support is only in 10.6.5 and above, so make sure your OSX is upgraded!

Open terminal, and move to home (cd ~), then again, (backup first if needed!) remove all the dirs that you want to link (rm -R Documents), and then create the symbolic link to your Data folder (ln -s /Volumes/Data/Documents) <-- Replace Data with whatever your shared partition is called.

Lastly, is our Linux...  I'm using Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.10, so some of the steps may or may not work for you.

First we need to install exFat support on Linux, there is a very nicely working implementation on the PPA at https://launchpad.net/~relan/+archive/exfat and if you prefer to build from the sources, it's also on google code at http://code.google.com/p/exfat/

Install the driver using the prebuilt ppa, or from the source referring to the quick start guide at http://code.google.com/p/exfat/wiki/QuckStartGuide

Then we need to make it auto mount on boot.  So we create a dir for it (sudo mkdir /media/Data), and then add a line in /etc/fstab to tell Ubuntu to automount it on boot (sudo gedit /etc/fstab, add the line "/dev/sda4    /media/Data    exfat-fuse    defaults    0    0")  <-- Remember to replace the sda4 with whatever your data partition device is called!

We can then test it with "sudo mount -a" and see if the directory mounts.. If it works, then we're good to go!  Just remove the directories in your home folder and link to the appropriate folders on Data, (use the instructions from the OSX section), and now you'll have shared documents, pictures, music, whatever else you chose in your exfat partition!

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