I just bought a new notebook with VISTA installed. I was just going to shrink it down to 20gb and use SuSE Linux on the rest of the hard drive.

But what if I had two boot partitions and a third data partition, formated as ext3? Could I have both windows and linux share the data on it?

There are ways to get Windows to read ext3 partitions, and to make Linux read NTFS partitions, but if *I* was doing it, I would make the shared partition FAT32, which both have mature tools to deal with.

it would be more compatible if you formated that extra partition as FAT32 then both Linux and Windows could read & write files to it...

I prefer the shared partition to be EXT3--you have more control over permissions.

For the rare occassions that I use Windows, I have the ext2fsd driver installed---it works like a charm.

I would have maybe 15-20GB** for Windows, 10 for Linux, 20-30 for shared data, and the rest unpartitioned (to hold in reserve)

**How much does Vista need, if your data is elsewhere?

I use a fat32 shared partition on my laptop. I very rarely use XP now (only really for iTunes on my ipod) but I have found that this solution works extremely well. Both Linux and XP are happy working with Fat32.

I'm sure that other solutions work well too though...

here's a quick benefits/risks/mitigation for 3 file systems mentioned:

fat32 painless sharing/no security/keep sensitive data elsewhere

ntfs secure in vista/not native to linux/ntfs3g & fuse are great

ext3 secure in linux/ext3-win apps not vista compatible/wait for new ver.

at the moment a 'common' fat32 partition is your simplest answer (IMHO).

but

don't forget that vista puts user data in different places than xp. and new apps & system components point to several new subdirectories in c:\users\bob\ by default. so you'll need to be aware of where data is stored *especially* if you put it where vista/winapps didn't put it.

happy trails
dan
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It all depends on the size of the shared partitions. If it needs to be larger than 32GB, Fat 32 may be out of the question because Windows won't make any larger fat32 partitions. Maybe it can read them if you make them under Linux but I'm not sure. It's certainly not my favorite file system because it is very prone to fragmentation.

Ext3 may be a good option but NTFS works just as well nowadays. In the latter case, you'll need to use a few special options to make it fully functional under Linux but it's not as if it's awfully complex.

huh? I have an 80Gb FAT32 partition... I don't remember if I created it with windows's installer or with gparted, but it's there and it works fine.

Well it is fragmented like hell, but... it works. I'm currently moving all my data to ext3, it's much more secure. No need to access it from windows if I'm 99% of the time on Linux...

The 32GB limit is just for the win format tool. I created a ~140GB FAT32 partition with the Gparted LiveCD. It works with no problem.

It's taking up 8gb fresh out of the box. I'm figuring on allowing 20gb, out of a 160 drive.

Is this the updated driver you're talking about? My notebook has a AMD Turion 64 processor, so I like how the instructions are right there.

http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/proje...ts.htm#ext2fsd

I'm thinking I'll be mostly running linux, so it seems better to stick with the ext3 filesystem. But of course it would be a pain if VISTA hosed my home directory on linux.

I was planning on using th Gparted on Knoppix to resize the Vista C: drive partition from 70 down to 20, and then put a boot menu on bootup where I can choose any one of four partitions to boot from.

Does this seem possible with Gparted?

Yes, that's perfectly possible. Just make sure that you keep the windows partition large enough for future updates, software installs and temporary files.

I don't know if the knoppix version of gparted is old. The version included in ubuntu is very old and buggy, it is the 0.2.5 version. The actual livecd is 0.3.4-8. The versions 0.3.3-x are almost 1 year old in the best case. I think only the 2007 versions of the livecd were really tested under vista.

Go to the Gparted forum to look about. There are some posts about vista resizing. It is a little different than with xp resizing. Although the ntfs partitions are externally the same, vista has more control over them. In xp, after resizing you need to reboot 2-3 times (at least) into windows, chkdsk is automatically checking and adjusting the filesystem, and that's all. In vista you need to have the vista dvd nearby, because the system needs a "repair" after resizing (although some users didn't mention any repair need).

I don't know if the vista resizer would shrink vista as much as you want to. Anyway, I'm affraid that 20GB would be too small. It's perhaps enough for the system with a few applications, even big, but if you need to create some big dvd image file, it takes about 9GB for a 2-layer dvd. I read about people who tried to expand a small windows partition just for this. I don't know how big will be the vista updates and system backups+restore points.

If the computer was a desktop, there would be no problem with larger partitions, because it wouild be easy to add a second hard drive. But, with a notebook it isn't easy to add drives. So, if you have Linux s/w solutions for video file work, you could go down to 20GB for vista. I think you need to create at least an extended partition in the free space to not have any future problems, as the maximum number for primary partitions is 4.

Thank you! That's exactly why I want to use an 80-100gb ext3 partition for both Vista and Linux data storage. Also, you can buy 500gb USB external drives for $150, and I was planning to use that for video as well.

I assume gpart sets up a boot menu. What I'm planning at this point is a 10gb fat32 boot partition for the Acer utilities, that's already there and I don't want to bother it. Then a 30 gb VISTA boot partition. Then a 20 gb SuSE 10.2 boot partition. Then a 10 gb boot partition to try other Linux distros on. That should leave me with an 80-90 gb partition to use for storage.