You really don't want to "share a partition,"
period. Rather, what you want to do is to share the drive as you do in Windows. The standard tool for doing this is called
samba, (
http://www.samba.org) and it allows Linux to operate as a full-featured and well-behaved Windows server.
You can gain graphical-console access to a Linux machine from a Windows machine through the use of an
X-windows client ... search Google. Unlike Windows, Linux is a
client-server GUI, which means that you can get full graphical access to another machine located hundreds of miles away, without the nonsense of a terminal-server or PCAnywhere-type "solution."
(sic)