After having yet another HD crash... I bought an internal 250GB hard drive and a USB HD enclosure.

Am about to hook it up but wondering about the FS that I want to put on it.

Computers I will backup:

Computer 1 (2 drives, total ~35GB):
WindowsXP ntfs (using Norton Ghost 2003)

Computer 2 (the one that died) (1 drive - 200GB):
WindowsXP ntfs (using Norton Ghost 2003)
Slackware 9.1 reiserfs (using partimage? - Ghost's support for reiser doesn't look promising)

Computer 3 (1 drive - 20 GB):
Redhat 8 ext3 (using partimage?)


Have Slax on a CD (slackware on a bootable CD), but may get Knoppix for restoring the partimage files (never backed up a Linux box to date, so not 100% sure PartImage is the way to go, but reviews looked good)

Now on the new drive, I wasn't planning on installing an OS, just using it as a file store.

FS debates:
NTFS - don't want to use since Linux will not be able to write to it, only read (at least without working forever on it)

FAT32 - could write from both OSs (WinXP & Linux), but it is limited to a max file size of 4GB which could be a royal pain with ghosting large GB partitions

Linux (ext3 or reiserfs) - don't think that ghost would be able to write to one of these, unless I am mistaken.

Multiple (NTFS for certain %, reiserfs for the other %) - would work great except if I need to change the partion sizes (don't want to spend money on PartitionMagic).

Any advice? Any hope to use just one FS for the full 250 GB to ghost Window's computers onto and backup Linux partitions?

Why not use samba? It was invented to solve such problems. The clients would not need to know what filesystem is being used. That other OS can treat your samba server storage as a "mapped drive" or as a network share. Linux boxes can use smbclient to use the samba server. You can use a gui in Linux, too. LinNeighborhood and gnautilus or konqueror with lisa daemon running to scan your network.

The external drive has no OS on it, just a file store. So, there is no OS to receive the samba request. Right now, I have 2 partitions, one for NTFS and one for ReiserFS until I can find a better way

Mount the external disc in your Linux filesystem. That usually happens automatically at start up. Set up a samba share for it. That other OS on other clients accesses it by "Network Neighborhood" or as a mapped drive. I normally use ext3 but Reiserfs is popular. They each have advantages depending on the number and size of files.