Will this partition scheme work?
 

I have no choice but to keep windoze xp on my laptop, because of school purposes. But I don't want to give 1 mg more than I need. So I figured I would partition my 40Gb drive as follows.

10Gb -->Windont xp NTFS
10Gb --> Fat32 (shared)
20Gb --> Red Hat 9 (ext3)

What I figure I can do here is automount the fat32 drive in Linux, so both OS's can read/write to the shared fat32 drive. Is this realistic? Anyone else use shared drives like this? I really want to get the partitioning right the first time... Thanks...

Shouldn't be any problems with that scheme.

So Linux doesn't have any difficulty writing to fat32? I know NTFS write support is experimental, but I wasn't sure about phat32.
Cool, my download is almost done. I have some serious installing to do(five machines) :-) Thanks again Tricky..

Yeah, writing to FAT32 or VFAT filesystem will usually give you no problems compared to NTFS which isn't recommended, only read-only that is.

How about not having NTFS partition? You don't need it. FAT32 should be enough, I think. Then you don't need the partition to share files (can write to Windows). As far as I know it requires XP reinstallation, but is a better idea, IMHO.

Mara, that's not a good idea :)

I mean, having MS products (besides
mice and joysticks ;}) isn't, anyway. But
if you really do run their systems, you should
take advantage of NTFS, too ... there's
performance, and there's security to be
taken into account. And in both respects
you don't want to use FAT.

Cheers,
Tink

Don't know about performance, but I don't see security. When there's phisical access to a machine, there's no security :P. Encrypted filesystem can be secure...

So you're running your Linux on a Fat partition
since there's physical access to your machine
possible and Linux' access rights don't make
a difference? ;)


Cheers,
Tink

No, because I like journalling. :) Acess rights are good, but it's not a good argument (as far as I know XP Home has a very strange permission system, in fact it doesn't have any). And most people I know don't care about security (don't like the idea of access rights, don't like firewalls etc). ;)

The people you know probably have nothing to protect but if you would like to have a secure microsoft OS you will want to have NTFS. Also i would also recommend using NTFS on windows xp since its is native filesystem and it gives better performence, better security and you'll have a less chance of having a corrupted hardrive.

and yes that scheme will have no problem working with linux.