If I was to make a FAT32 partition on a disk with the linux filesystem, could I mount this partition within linux, and access the partition from windows when I boot to the other disk? When I was dual booting before I used a portable drive to move mp3 and graphics files between the two, but I'm thinking there has to be a better way.

yes, linux can mount windows partitions to view/read from within linux.. and most likely you should be able to get windows to recognize it as well.

The post was kinda confusing because a FAT32 partition is really a FAT32 filesystem on a size X partition. I think the answer to your questions is: yes.

Linux, and when I write this, I mean any given distro's stock kernel, is going to be able to read-write to a FAT32 partition with virtually no chance of data corruption... maybe even less of a chance than windows itself. Be careful about putting long filenames on the FAT32 partition as this has a tendancy to confuse window's 8-bit.3-bit mentality.

Windows cannot, and almost definately will not ever be able to see ext2fs, ext3, or Reiser.

Say you have the following partition scheme:

/dev/hda1 4Gb FAT32 (because windows 95-Me always has to be the 1st partition on the first IDE disk
/dev/hda2 4Gb ext2 Linux
/dev/hda3 100Mb Linux Swap
/dev/hdb1 10Gb FAT32 (second disk, formatted FAT, with all of the sharable stuff, for instance, the monster MP3 collection)

Windows will just see that drive... probably as D:
In Linux, mount the drive with:

mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /mnt

the '-t vfat' is largely unnecessary on most modern distros that will just detect and uto-load the module for dealing with FAT. The /mnt as a mount point was arbitrary... you can technically mount it anywhere. I'm a big fan of creating a top level directory called /pub or /C: or /win and mounting it there. You can also modify your /etc/fstab to mount the drive automatically upon boot.

Hope that helps,

Cheers,

Finegan