This article is a good read if you access Windows/DOS drives from Linux. The author explains how to access those drives, as well as some of the restrictions and problems when using vfat drives.
NTFS is also an option of course, but as Linux only has read-only access to that, vfat is a better solution if you want to share files between the two operating systems. Pity it’s so slow and has so many restrictions. 🙁
There’s also a warning contained within: if you’re using a Linux 2.4 kernel, be wary if you have vfat partitions over 130GB in size. You will lose data. This problem was solved in the now widely available 2.6 kernel.
I think that you might find that more and more, you can write to NTFS with a 2.6 kernel installed. I’ve been writing to NTFS (not heavily) on my desktop for over a year now with no problems yet. I still use a vfat partition to share between Linux/Windows just in case, though.
Corey,
Can you actually create new files or are you just overwriting old ones? I know that with 2.6 you can write safely to NTFS but the file can’t change size.
Thanks!