Mounting exFAT in Ubuntu

Recently, I was trying to access NTFS based partitions in Mac OSX Snow Leopard, which always shows them as "read only" partitions. I got to understand that OSX by default only supports NTFS read only. I have had an option of using FAT with OSX and that too have its own limitation, one I know is the max file size less than 4gb.

So, I decided to partition my drive as exFAT, which is supported in both Windows and Mac. But when I tried accessing the same from my Ubuntu machine, it failed. So here is what I did to fix the problem in Ubuntu.

sudo su -
add-apt-repository ppa:relan/exfat
apt-get update
apt-get install fuse-exfat

With the above setting you will be able to manually mount the drives. In order to make this process automated this is what  I followed.

apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install ncurses-dev
apt-get install util-linux

With this it worked in all the operating systems I work on. 

Shrink and extend disk partitions in Windows 7

Its been a long time since I played with partitioning hard drives and creating and deleting volumes. Way back in Windows era, there was no way to shrink and extend disk partitions. Recently I installed Ubuntu in my machine hosting Windows 7 and found one very useful option in Disk Utility i.e. to shrink and extend volumes. Here we go.

 Here is how we can shrink a volume. This will create an empty partition or unallocated space in your disk. Inn the similar way you can extend a volume where in you can assign extra space from unallocated disk space.

My Computer → Right Click → Manage

Select Disk Management → Select the partition

Right Click → Shrink Volume

You might see this message

Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB