Before I start, don't lecture me on the fact that FAT32 is old and hasn't been updated for nearly 20 years. Right now I have sorted that. I am trying to install Ubuntu Linux onto a 64GB flash drive and it wants me to format it to one of the EXT file systems.
The problem is if I put the flash drive into a Windows PC, I can't use it. I also can't install the required software onto every Windows PC that I will use. When I tried to install it on FAT32 I got an error and there is no option for NTFS.
Does anyone know how I could do this? Maybe a Windows based tool? Thanks in advance.
Best Answer
Linux relies on a number of filesystem features that simply are not supported by FAT or NTFS -- Unix-style ownership and permissions, symbolic links, etc. Thus, Linux can't be installed to either FAT or NTFS. (It used to be possible to do this using a FAT driver that adds those features, but it was removed from the kernel years ago because nobody was maintaining it.)
If you need a USB flash drive that both boots Linux and can be accessed from Windows, then I second Zonder's recommendation to create a FAT or NTFS data partition on the drive, along with the Linux partition(s). Note that you'll need to put the FAT or NTFS partition first on the disk, because Windows treats USB flash drives as "superfloppies," and will access only the first partition on the disk. Linux is not limited in this way, so you can put the Linux partition(s) after the shared-data partition. Also note that you can't use FAT or NTFS as the Linux
/homepartition; if you go this route, you'll need to mount the shared-data partition somewhere else in Linux.