Need assitance in creating a shared partition accessible by both Linux and Windows XP
 

I am currently running Mandrake v10.0. I am planning on installing Windows XP later on. My hard drive is 160 gb. Using the Linux partition tool, I created three partitions. There are two 40GB partitions. One is currently running Linux and the other is reserved for Windows XP when I install it. The third partition is 80GB. For whatever reason I cannot mount/access this partition. Does anyone know how to go about mounting this and setting up permission so that I will be able to use that partition? Explicit instructions are neccesary as Linux is still a new environment to me.

mkdir /mnt/winshare
mount /dev/hd?? /mnt/winshare -t type -o umask=000

hd?? is the harddrive and partition you want to mount
most likely it will be hda3
-t type is supposed to be either ntfs or vfat (for fat16/32)

or you can just paste the output of
"fdisk /dev/hda -l" here

In addition was that partition ever formatted?

I think it was formatted. But I can always reformat it.

So what were the errors and how were you trying to mount the partition?

vfat
 

Is the partition VFAT? Because most kernel's I've used that came off a CD didn't support the NTFS file system.