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Old 16th September 2009
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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Since you are only running OpenBSD, and NTFS under OpenBSD can, if you enable it, only move data from NTFS and not to it.... NTFS is not an appropriate mid-point storage medium.

To install XP on your system requires free, unallocated space at the MBR level. If you had unallocated space you could give to a new MBR partition, you could set up XP to multiboot. If you do not have that space, you will have to reconfigure OpenBSD, or replace it.

There is no difference in how I/O is conducted with a USB mass storage device, be it IDE/PATA, SATA, or Flash memory. You *could* format your external USB device as FAT32 -- up to 2TB is possible with default cluster sizes, up to 8TB is possible with 32KB clusters.

All it takes is fdisk(8), disklabel(8), and newfs_msdos(8).

There are three limitations to using FAT32: 1) there is no concept of file ownership. 2) there is no concept of file access control, other than a read/only bit. 3) The maximum individual file size is 4GB. The latter should not be a show stopper, as there are ways to break up larger files if you have them.

You could back up all of your OpenBSD files-of-interest to FAT32, replace OpenBSD with XP on the hard drive, then restore those files to your system's hard drive. After that, you could restructure the external drive's MBR table and format as desired from XP.

If it were me, and this single-system with one internal and one external disk drive were what I had .... and OpenBSD -> XP was my objective, this is what I would do.
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