University of Baltimore
Merrick School of Business

Mini-project 5: File systems in Windows and Linux

Go to the MISLAB. Log in Linux using your group account in your group "machine" by selecting Linux in the boot login in the machine corresponding to your group number. In this mini-project you will also need root (administrative) privileges. You will need to use the command sudo to login as root, when needed, using your regular password. See again an example on how to use sudo here.

1. Open a shell prompt and become root. Very carefully (you can delete your machine hard-drives file system if you are not careful) do the following and explain what you see in each step:

   1. type fdisk /dev/hdb and when you have the command prompt type m (what did you see?)
   2. type p (what did you see?)
   3. type l (what did you see?)
   4. finally type q

   Note: You can copy and paste the results to a Kedit file, or capture screens.

2. Save a copy of the File System Table (/etc/fstab) in the report and explain its entries. Compare the results with what you saw using fdisk.

3. Save to a file in each group member account a list of the files in each group member account. Use different names for these files corresponding to each group member. For example Joe, Peter and Sue could save the list in files sue.list, joe.list, and peter.list.

4. Bring an USB drive to the Lab, insert it in an USB port and mount it. Copy each of the files created above to the USB drive, including the ones for fdisk and fstab.

5. Bring any CD-ROM from home (not a music CD) and copy the directory of the CD to the USB drive.
6. Log in Windows as Administrator and create a file containing the directory listing of the USB drive. Include in your report a copy of the listing of the USB drive directory in Windows.

7. Continuew in Windows and use Disk Management and compare what you see in terms of partitions with what you saw using /etc/fstab and fdisk.
8. Read the tutorial on Sharing a partition between Windows and Linux, use Disk Management again, and check if it would be possible to do so in your MIS Lab machine. Check and explain why you can or cannot do it. Do not change anything.

9. Use Windows help and explain how can you convert a FAT32 partition into NTFS. Do you need to reformat the partition? Why should we use NTFS instead of FAT32? What levels of RAID are supported by Windows 2000? (Hint: use Help)
10. Use Computer Management to defragment a hard-drive, then compress it. What is the difference, how it works?
11. Finally, prepare the final report (Windows plus Linux file system). Save the report in MS Word format as mp5.doc and post it in the Mini-project 5 entry of the Assignments folder of one of the group members in WebTycho.

This page is maintained by Al Bento who can be reached at abento@ubalt.edu This page was last updated on January 24, 2007. Although we will attempt to keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided.