- #FILE SYSTEM FOR BOTH MAC AND WINDOWS SERIAL#
- #FILE SYSTEM FOR BOTH MAC AND WINDOWS SOFTWARE#
- #FILE SYSTEM FOR BOTH MAC AND WINDOWS PLUS#
- #FILE SYSTEM FOR BOTH MAC AND WINDOWS FREE#
- #FILE SYSTEM FOR BOTH MAC AND WINDOWS WINDOWS#
#FILE SYSTEM FOR BOTH MAC AND WINDOWS SOFTWARE#
Nigel McFarlane is an open source software analyst and technologist with a broad background in technology and software engineering. If you want to dig into Linux further, then there are plenty of tools that can be used as inspection points. Mostly file systems work for you silently. In the usual case you can even see the superblock: try “ /sbin/dumpe2fs /dev/hda1” where hda1 comes from the output of “ df.” The name “ dumpe2fs” is a casualty of history it replaces the older “ dumpfs.” The information produced is really just for diagnostic purposes.
#FILE SYSTEM FOR BOTH MAC AND WINDOWS FREE#
Type “ df” to see the devices currently mounted, and their free space. Type “ cat /etc/fstab” to see all the mountable devices, including floppy disks and CD players. You can see all this at work on Linux, but for some of it you need to be logged in as root. The equivalent Linux command is “ mount.” On Linux there are no drive letters, so one file system is mounted on “/” and all other file systems are mounted on subdirectories of “/.” This arrangement is like the little-used MS-DOS command SUBST, or the NET USE command that supports Novell‘s NetWare. On Windows, there is one drive letter per mounted file system: for example, C: for C: and D: for D. There are no special restrictions on files placed in the topmost directory on Linux, either. The superblock is just about always in memory on Linux that is not the case for ancient DOS-like file systems. This provides redundancy in case of a partial disk corruption. A Linux file system has multiple copies of the superblock physically saved on the disk. On Linux, the equivalent on most filesystems is the superblock.
#FILE SYSTEM FOR BOTH MAC AND WINDOWS WINDOWS#
Linux uses “ mkfs” (“make file system”) in various specialist forms.Įach Windows file system has a File Allocation Table ( FAT, VFAT, or similar) that states which disk blocks hold the topmost directory.
Windows uses FORMAT.EXE to format a disk.
#FILE SYSTEM FOR BOTH MAC AND WINDOWS PLUS#
Linux also has “ msdos” and “ vfat” file systems for compatibility with Windows and DOS, plus more. Also, “ minix” is an example of the ancient standard responsible for UNIX file names once being limited to 14 characters. On Linux, filesystems can be “ minix,” “ ext,” or “ ext2,” to name a few. Recall FAT16 is the ancient standard responsible for Windows file names with the “ 8.3” file name length restriction. On Windows, file systems can be FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS, to name a few.
#FILE SYSTEM FOR BOTH MAC AND WINDOWS SERIAL#
Also, the device file is not an ordinary text file, it is a “ special file.” Since disks are block devices (unlike a serial mouse), such a file is fully described as a “ block special device file.” The numbered part of the path can be a little weird to get right it’s best to be guided by documentation there or extract the right name from a report.
Such a file is a device file (since a disk is a device), hence the “dev” part of the path name. On Linux, each file system gets a device, like /dev/hda1 (“hard disk A part 1”), which is represented as a file. That is about the end of the similarity.Įach Windows file system gets a drive letter, like “C:”. On both Windows and Linux, it is common to have at most one file system per partition. That is the bit of disk used to boot the operating system and to state whether the disk is partitioned or not.
On hardware derived from Intel or IBM PCs, both Windows and Linux use the Master Block Record/ Master Boot Record ( MBR). The architecture of Windows and Linux file systems is similar in some points, but diverges greatly when tools are considered. One whole hierarchy is called a “ file system” on both platforms. Such directories are usually called “ folders” when viewed in a GUI.
In terms of recovery tools, only a limited number of tools can be used on Windows, while there is a large number of UNIX based recovery tools available for Linux file systems.īoth Windows and Linux organize disk-based files into a hierarchy of directories. Because of the existence of swap partitions, you never run out of memory in Linux (like in windows). Linux has two kinds of major partitions called data partitions and swap partitions. Please see one of my earlier post What “Everything Is a File” Means on Linux. In contrast to Windows, everything is either a file or a process in Linux. Unlike Windows, Linux is bootable from a network drive. Windows uses FAT and NTFS as file systems, while Linux uses a variety of file systems.