So, you all agree that my best option now is to follow jschiwal's indication? If yes, what is the best guide for doing it?

Back up your data. DVD-RW or a USB key.

Use your Live CD to change the format of your ntfs partition. You will find gparted at System>Administration>GParted (or Partition Editor, can't remember).

Right click on the partition and "unmount" if it is mounted.

Right click on partition and select "Format to" and then ext4.

MS, as far as I know, can't read ext4. I hope that is still true. If you need to have MS be able to read the files use ext3.

Do not do partitioning work from a partition on the same drive you are messing with. It is somewhat risky. This is why the LiveCD comes with gparted and it is not installed, by default, on your system.

I can't try that so soon, because we're talking about 167,7 GB and I don't have an external drive this big. Thank you for your help anyway.

Regarding: "If you need to have MS be able to read the files use ext3."

Does this mean that if I want to share this folder on my home network with other PCs that have Windows installed I should format the partition to ext3 or can I use ext4?

If you want to share your folders over the network with Windows machines you have to use Samba. For Samba it makes no difference on which filesystem your folders are placed (but also not sure about NTFS here).
I think widget meant local access, there are drivers for ext3 for Windows.

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Absolutely right.

I know nothing about samba, won't have a thing to do with MS including letting one connect to my file system.

Any of you folks are welcome here but if you bring a laptop with MS it has to stay outside in the truck.

I have now two partitions, both formatted as ext4. One with Ubuntu 10.10 64-bits and the other just for data (formatted as ext4 zero). I wanted to share a folder from this second partition. I followed the instructions on http://tech.mobiletod.com/how-enable...cation-ubuntu/ but there was not any "Windows networks (SMB)" option, only "Unix networks (NFS)". Why is this? Did I do wrong in formatting the second partition as ext4 (should I have left it as NTFS)?

Hi follow this link to share linux partion/folder, for windows https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sa...mbaServerGuide.

Its always better to configure any service/server using CLI rather than GUI

I prefer GUI to CLI. Problem solved. See [SOLVED] Sharing folder with Windows network.