I have a 650Gb HDD usb drive that I wish to use with ubuntu 10.04LTS
aswell as on a WINXP system.
HDD is clean.
My ubuntu system has a /home partition formatted to EXT3, but as I use
IFDRIVE to read this partition from windows, it needs to be set to have
inode of 128 eg (mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 -i 128)

my way of thinking is I need to partition the drive, format the drive to
EXT3 making sure that is set inode to 128
How do is the best way to do this?

Then I need to get ubuntu to talk to this drive when I plug it in
How do I do this?

Thanks for any help

Having do9ne this sort of thing, keep windows out of ext* if you want my advice.
Way to go:
Windows - on whatever
Linux system on ext, reiser, or whatever you choose
/home/somewhere a VFAT partition. Linux will read it, windows will read it, and you can mount it with options uid & gid (=you) so writing won't be an issue.

What is VFAT like for fragmentation?
Will Linux or windows look after the partition.

Can anybody tell me difference between vfat and ext3.Why are there so many file systems.Why the whole engineering research and scientific institutions have single universal filesystem?
If we have one file system all over the world it will help us concentrate more on development rather than partitions and formatting and learning.If we have single universal partition we can concentrate on research and development rather than formatting etc. I am new to Linux so may be wrong so don't mind if I said something which you all experts didn't like.

vfat is crap for defragmentation, not that it matters hugely. ext3 does it's own defrag.

Part of the reason for the multiplicity of filesystems are copyright issues. GPL'ed filesystems are open, but m$ doesn't implement them. vfat was to improve on the 8.3 msdos 16bit format, and because they were going to 32 bit anyhow. Many OSes writes it's own filesystem(s), suited to it's needs, or limitations. NTFS was an attempt at a 'secure' filesystem with checksums and stuff, because windows would obediently flush itself down it's own jacks if it was told to. So they made sure it would cop on that the disk had been changed.

In linux, there is a plethora of systems free to use without copyright issues, for which you should be grateful. System Designers have a choice.

MM that is what I thought,
I've been using EXT3 with windows dual boot for about two years with a smooth running system,
Just finding it a little hard to get ubuntu to work with my USB drive when not a FAT32 would prefer it to be a EXT3 drive