I thought I had read an article somewhere once about how to use the same partition for both the windows xp pagefile and the linux SWAP space, but I can't seem to find it now despite my best searching. I did find one for Windows 98, but seeing as how it's pre-NTFS technology, I'm not sure how that'd work.

Anyone have some insight or a link that would help me out?

I've never seen Windows with a separate partition for swap, pagefile, etc. Doesn't Windows just use a file within the basic (C) partition?

More to the point, why would you want/need to have this shared?

By default windows does that, yes. But it's much faster to have the Windows pagefile on a seperate drive. By sharing the windows pagefile with the linux SWAP space, you save space. Afterall, you can't use both of them at the same time anyways, might as well put them on the same drive.

Yes you can - probably require some code in the init scripts to do it cleanly.
Retry your searching - I've seen several docos on this as I've cruised the 'net.

Here you go. I've have not seen anything similar for XP nor do I know if it will work the same either.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Swap-Space.html

Yeah, that's the one I'd seen before. I don't know if it will work either. I plan on trying it though, I don't see why XP wouldn't work on a FAT16 partition.

That is *seriously* out of date, and just plain wrong in parts.
I found this without much trouble.
Go to the bottom.

that is out of date I doubt it would work in win xp

I should know by tomorrow evening, so I'll let you know if it works or not.

Maybe Windows XP CAN use a Linux swap partition!

I just encountered this situation yesterday while trying to convert a hard drive from dual boot to Windows XP only. (Lets just say I didn't want Windows near my Linux stuff, and the Linux portion of the disk was already moved to its own drive.) In Windows XP, I tried to use a Partition Manager to delete the Linux partitions and it told me that the Linux swap partition (Type 82) could not be deleted because it was still active! (By the way, a Linux swap partition is, by default not a ext-2 or vfat partition -- it has its own structure, mostly like a raw partition.)

Really? I'm curious as to how that could work. The Linux swap partition is formatted as Linux swap. Can Windows write to such a beast?

I'd be willing to bet 'doze doesn't give a rats arse - just use whatever it is pointed at. The necessity to issue mkswap on going back to Linux would be evidence of the same.
It should be noted mkswap also works this way - point it at the wrong thing, and you are history. It'll quite happily trample on anything - without asking.

I had never even considered this before. Food for thought...thanks!