I would like some advice/comments on following setup:

I currently dual boot Debian and Windows Xp. But I need to repartition my harddisks and I want to change the layout whilst doing so.

The main question I currently have is games related. I've been using wine for quite a while now, and I've successfully managed to run a lot of games with it. But I keep XP because of gaming (why else...) for those titles that will not run with wine, or for that extra bit of performance.
Anyhow, I'm increasingly annoyed by often having 'two copies' of a game, one on a ntfs formatted partition for XP, the other in a .wine subfolder on my home partition.
The obvious solution would be to have a 'dedicated' games partiton, which both XP and linux can fully access. This leads to the question of what filesystem to use for such a partition. The choices:
ntfs, ext3, or vfat.
vfat is old and error prone, due to encoding issues and access rights. ntfs is fully writeable from within linux by now, but I don't really know about the performance (on linux side).
ext3(or ext2) access from within windows is also possible (http://www.fs-driver.org/ or http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/), but again I'm not sure about performance, this time on XP's side.

The other question is also somewhat performance related.
Both XP and linux implement virtual memory, linux calls it swap, XP pagefile. I have two physical harddisks, and basically I want to know which disk is best used for storing XP's pagefile, linux swap partitions.
I know that with linux I can have multiple swap-areas, so best thing would probably be to have one swap partition on each drive.
With XP, I've heard it to be best to store the pagefile on the disk XP is not installed on, atleast when two or more disks are availible.
But, regarding my first question, which disk is more suited for housing my 'dedicated' games partition, the one XP resides on, or where the pagefile lies?

I know this is a Linux board and I'm sorry for offending everyone with those capital XPs dotted around my post, but I feel my question being valid enough to do so, and would very much like to hear your thoughts on the issues mentioned.

I don't play any games locked into Windows, but I dual boot Win2K & Suse 10.3 on a desktop and WinXP & Suse 10.3 on a laptop, due to having some legacy issues with Excel spreadsheets, and a specialist app for cricket scorers. I tried Wine some time ago and didn't like it, but will be trying again in the near future. VMware doesn't support Windows on my processors.

I have been using NTFS partitions for Windows for about a year, and have had no problems with the ntfs-3g driver. I also use USB external hdd's for backup and they too work fine with NTFS partitions. I've tried this on the machines at the office and had the same results.

This is one I can answer better. On my desktop I have 2 hdd's, with Win2K on one and Suse 10.3 on the other. The box has 1.25Gb of ram, and after experimenting for some time I have ended up with a 2Gb Linux swap partition on the Win hdd, and a 3Gb NTFS partition for the pagefile on the Linux hdd. I think the Linux swap partition could be smaller, as it only gets used if I am making graphics for a website, and have GIMP, Quanta+, gFtp & a couple of browser all open at once. I use GKrellm to monitor my system, and the swap meter mostly doesn't register unless I am switching in and out of GIMP.

I still haven't found a good way to monitor the pagefile usage in real time so I did a "suck-it-n-see" with PhotoShop and some other apps and ended up leaving it at 3Gb. I've got more than enough disk space to spare.

On a general note about partitioning, I now always install Win2K or XP with at least 3 partitions, c:\ for the system, d:\ for My Documents (either use the function built in or TweakUI), and a 3rd for the PageFile. On Linux I have a partition for root, one for /home, one for /usr/local, plus sometimes one for /opt (depends on the distro) and on servers it is good to have one for /srv (for Apache) and one for /var/log (in case you get a runaway problem and the error log files start to fill up).

Hope this was useful.

I think I'll use ntfs for my games partition. Mainly because for most games to run properly I'll use XP, and of course ntfs is the proper choice there.
I've also used the ntfs-3g driver for quite a while now, and I've never had any problems with it (actually saved me a few times...).
I'll put this partition on my second disk, along with a linux swap partiton.
My first disk will house XP, another linux swap partiton, and of course my root and home partitions.

Now that sounds pretty nice, doesn't it?