How is everyone that dual boots share thier data. I tried making a fat 32 partition and mounting it as /home but Xwindows and KDE don't like that because they are trying to create links.

you mean sharing with windows?? you wouldn't keep /home on fat32, that's just not going to work. instead maybe have somethign like /home/user/share or just /share as the mount point for the shared drive.

roblem is if I try to mount an ext2 partition as /home/user I can only access it as root because mount said ext2 doesn't support the uid= and gid= options.

"problem is if I try to mount an ext2 partition as /home/user I can only access it as root because mount said ext2 doesn't support the uid= and gid= options."

Why not upgrade to ext3?

I think you should use a different mount point for sharing data; not use /home for it.

enine, you're seriously misunderstanding what those options are for. the uid and gid options are used when you are mounting non-unix compliant file system, i.e. one that can not understand file ownership and unix permissions. ext2 is a fully compliant unix file system, so understands these details. as such it makes no sense to have to crudely force the ownership. instead you use formal userland tools like chown and chmod to manipulate the files properly. I don't understand how you could possibly think you can't use a unix file system to hold unix file on a unix system...

I was leaving the gid and uid options there from when I was trying to mount the vfat parition, found out mount didn't like that
but when I mount under /home/enine I can't access it as enine because it gets mounted with root permissions evenif I give enine permissions to mount. I have to mount it as /home then create a folder called enine then assign permissions. is there any way to get it to mount as /home/enine with the proper permissions?

set up Linux on ext3, Reiser, whatever.
<optional> separate partition for /home (same filesystem)
create a data partition, formatted FAT32---mount this to a mount point inside /home---eg /home/data (Windows will see the data partition automatically)

Ideally, make the data partition a separate physical drive

Well you can't have another physical drive in a laptop so thats not an option. I was trying to mount it as /home/enine which won't work if I use fat32 since there a are a bunch of hidden folders created with links in them.
I installed an ext file system driver under xp and that seems to work well, I rarely ever use xp but thought I'd leave it there just in case I ever do need it.

Bad me--I didn't catch that latitude menat laptop....

2nd sentence doesn't make sense---hidden folders where?? If you make a new directory and then mount a FAT32 partition to it, it should work fine......

X and KDE make a bunch of . folders in the home folder and some of thos have symlinks as I found out when I tried to mount a fat32 drive as /home and X complained that it couldn't create the links.

Even trying to use the same /home with different distros concurrently, or different versions of the same distro, is likely to cause trouble if the different distros write different data to the same files. If you don't want to use different partitions for the different /home mount points you might get away with using soft links to point to different directories in the same partition.

OK--so DONT DO THAT!!!
mount a Linux partition at /home, make a mount point inside /home, and mount FAT32 there.....!!!

I would highly recommend that you don't mount any other filesystems to /home since this where linux puts it's user files. This is only going to cause you problems. You should make a directory such as /windows that isn't used for anything else to mount your other filesystems.

What I was trying to do is mount as /home/enine, that doesn't work because it gets the wrong permissions, so I mount as /home and I can set the permissions correctly. I didn't want to mount under my /enine folder because I already have a very large and complex directory structure setup with simlinks and links from open office documents and such that I would need to adjust.
it looks like I'm going to be ok mounting as /home then setting my permissions for enine under home then "mount" that under windows if I need my documents. unfortunatly there are people that still run windows and I sometimes need to see what I'm doing to support their stuff so I need access to XP.