Long-shot Windows XP question

[Randy J. Ray]

> This may not help you, but I thought the standard way to do this sort of 
> thing was to have three partitions: one for Linux, one for Windows, and 
> a common FAT32 slice for the other two sides to share & exchange files.

That's what I have. However, if you hibernate Windows (as opposed to a complete 
shutting-down) it retains a ramdisk-skewed impression of what is on the VFAT 
slice. Return to Linux and add/change a file, then return to Windows, and it 
has no idea the new data is there. Make a change within Windows at this point, 
and it will use the ramdisk/cache impression to obliterate the Linux-source 
changes.

> Alternatively (maybe), would VMWare get you anywhere?

Not in this case... the main use of the XP side is still games like Civ IV or 
Total War (neither of which I have much bandwidth for these days anyway). For 
that, I have to run natively.

I finally found a thread on ubuntuforums.org, and found a service that someone 
had written that hooks into the hibernate sequence and forces a complete flush 
of the disk caches before hibernation. Now that I have that, the core problem 
is gone. In its place, I now have a new problem: the first time I delete a file 
from the VFAT slice within Linux, the fs becomes read-only (the delete 
succeeds, though). If I umount and re-mount it, it's writable again. For 
exactly one delete operation, then read-only. If I copy data *to* it, it keeps 
the writable-bit.

I so fucking hate Windows...

(Ironically, this job will be giving me a Macbook Pro on or around Thursday, 
kitted with VMWare Fusion and having access to a 1Tb Time Capsule. At that 
point, I won't need to use my personal laptop for this. But I might as well 
solve this problem as ignore it and hope I never need to worry about it in the 
future.)

Randy
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Randy J. Ray                                                rjray at blackperl.com
Sunnyvale, CA                                              http://www.rjray.org
                                                             http://www.svsm.org