Is there any way to share my Linux /home and my Windows "Documents and Settings" folder. What I want is the following:
Windows insists on mounting /dev/hda3 as F: so I'm not sure if this is possible.

Thanks,

GR

It can be done but its not a good idea

-Joey

A possible solution is to create a fat32 partion where you have My Documents located for windows and have the option of mounting this when booted into linux. This way you can easily share data between windows and linux.

My box at work:

/dev/hda1 win2000 - NTFS
/dev/hda2 extended
/dev/hda5 fat32 data directory mounted as /data-w in linux - contains My Documents and other crap
/dev/hda6 /home
/dev/hda7 /
/dev/hda8 SWAP

This arrangement seems to work well for me.

HTH

Why is it a bad idea? Also, even if I don't do it, I'd still like to know how . Thanks.

I wouldn't imagine that using a fat32 file system from linux for your home folder could be very secure...

I can't say if this statement is true or not, however I CAN say that fat32 is not a terribly good filesystem and i would not wish to either have my linux /home use it or have linux write to it often as a system-critical partition. If you really want to try, just change fstab to read like this:

/dev/hda2 /home vfat defaults 0 0


not sure about the defaults part...... maybe auto,user .....?



Personally, I would not bother


If you want to know the BEST way to do things however, get yourself some old box to use as a combined samba and NFS server. This is what I do and it works very nicely.

I have an old slot one motherboard with a celery 366 and 128 MB of ram, throw away 2d vid card, no mouse, no keyboard, no sound, no monitor. This is set up with SuSE 8.2 on an 80 GIG HD with 5 extra partitions formated with EXT3 and all shared with both NFS and samba. My desktop box dual-boots win2000, Slack, and one extra partition for testing distros. No matter what I boot into with my desktop box, I have the same shares available to me. If you can scrap together some cheap hardware I would definitely do this. Plus you get to play with networking.

My 2.5 cents

I've done a similar thing on my computer, except instead of having the My Documents partition mount in /home, I had it mount at /home/user/MyFiles. To mount it to a specific directory in Windows you have to use the Disk Management tool. You can create a mount point in an empty folder on your NTFS partition with any NTFS, or FAT32 partition, but the mount point has to be a completely empty folder. I had a couple problems doing it, but it is possible. Here's what I did.
1st: I created a temp directory at C:\Documents and Settings\User\temp\
2nd: I right-clicked on my "My Documents" icon on the Desktop, went to properties, and changed the My Documents directory to the temp directory. I think that moved all the files to that directory.
3rd: I made absolutely sure that C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents was completely empty, then mounted the fat32 partition to it in Disk Management.
4th: Went back to the "My Documents" properties, and changed the "My Documents" directory back to C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents

Now, having told you that, I know think it was more trouble than it was worth, anyway. I could have easily just changed the My Documents directory to F:\ and made it much more simple, but at that time, I just wanted to keep the directory structure the same. I often make things more difficult for myself than is necessary.

I'd use a separate folder (on a FAAT) for best results. You can use umssync to turn that folder into an umsdos file system, which should work fine for /home. It will share the partition space with XP.
If you want to really have it all mixed together you'll have a mess. XP won't mind your linux files, but /home on a FAT won't work correctly -the FAT has no permissions system. If you use umsdos as I suggest, they can share the partition, but files that you put there under windows should not be placed inside the umsdos folder. Mount the whole partition on a mount point where you can access those. Then the umsdos folder for /home is a sub-mount of that.

As gnashly said,

FAT has no permissions system. It won't work properly for a /home partition.

Another solution would be to create a symlink to a FAT32 partition in your home directory, and just move stuff there... It's easier than manipulating your way through partitions all the time. That's what I have done, although I no longer run Windoze in any form on my personal machines (although I DO run Wine/WineX/Cedega). I don't even have Windoze installed on any of my systems anymore.

The only way to make a Linux partition useable in Windoze is to use some special file tools. Winoze can only natively read FAT, FAT32, NTFS and eventually the new filesystem for Longhorn. You have to add a program to get it to read any EXT2, EXT3, ReiserFS, or similar filesystem.