I have a computer that dual-boots Windows 7 and Linux Mint. I want to reconfigure my partitions so that I can access my documents and files easily on both. This would also make it easier to reinstall Windows or Linux without deleting my files. Is this a good idea? Are there any disadvantages to doing this?

There are tremendous difficulties in doing this. The structure and contents of the configuration files in Windows user directories are completely different from those of a Linux home directory (for Windows, that's all the stuff that used be under "Documents and Settings" in XP; I forget what it's called Win7 and I'm sure it's still there in some form in Win8).

If this worked at all, it would not work for long.

Most persons do not recommend sharing home directories between different Linux distros in a dual-boot system, because you may have different settings files and different settings in the different distros, giving rise to probable conflicts.

I deal with this problem by having an external USB drive formatted NTFS that I can access from either the Windows or the Linux side of my dual-boot computer. I also put my network shares on it.

I image you could do the same with a separate NTFS partition on your computer and use it as data storage and access it from either machine, though I've never done that; for Linux, I think you would need to add it to your /etc/fstab file.

Windows 7 has a different structure than XP. In Windows 7, the structure is C:\Users\{username}\Documents,Pictures,etc.

Couldn't I just create an NTFS partition with Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc. and mount it to "C:\Users\cameron" on Windows and "/home/{username}" (~) on Linux. The structure of the Linux ~ directory and the Windows 7 home (C:\Users\{username}) directory are pretty much identical. Windows XP is a different animal and probably won't work. I understand about not sharing between Linux distros since there are a lot of config files stored in the ~ directory, but it seems like it would work between Linux and Windows 7. Has anyone done this and can tell how well it worked?

Nope. That would surely break, and you'd get to keep all the pieces.

NTFS is supported under Linux (despite M$oft keeping its structure proprietary, and changing it every few years), but you wouldn't want to try using it for your hidden (dot) config files/directories. Mount your pictues at a sub-directory (on Linux), but not as your home folder.

It isn't just about the configs, or the similar structure.

As syg00 points out, NTFS would wreak havock with all those dot files.

More importantly, NTFS does not support the ownership and permissions of a *nix filesystem. Windoos would not care baout that, but when you booted into Linux it would break ... pretty much everything. Also as syg00 says, you get to keep all the pieces when that happens!

Just have a separate (NTFS) data partition.
From your ~/ you can just symlink your Data, Pictures, Video's folders etc. (and firefox/tbird profiles ).
From Win you could just use "shortcuts" or, probably better, do the magic incantations to move the "Named Folders" properly to the data partition.

I do this between linux installs (without the NTFS anymore) and it works well.

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This,
even better approach is to have a second hard drive for storage purposes that way you can access it from any system without any hassle.

Cheers

yes, you need to have at least 3 partitions: one for linux, one for windows and one for data (those can be located on different drives too). For example the two OSs are on an SSD and the data is stored on a hard disk. Additionally you can have another host/disk to store your important data on two different systems.

I did it for a long while. I used a shared ext4 partition and a driver in windows that let me read it.
I set the reg key in Windows that prevented windows from making all the my this and that folders then used my structure of the /home in Linux for most everything. Windows still made all its appdata and such but since I didn't use garbage programs like IE those were pretty small.
I rarely booted windows so it seemed to work fine.

Yeah, I think I'm just going to create an NTFS partition with all of the Documents, Pictures folders, and symlink C:\Users\Cameron in Windows to point to that partition, and just make Linux symlink to those individual folders. Windows does support files/folders beginning with a dot. Strangely, the only way to create them is from the command prompt. The explorer shell doesn't let you, even though it supports it. But I don't want to have all of those .files cluttering my home folder in Windows, so I'm just going to symlink.

Would NTFS be the best filesystem for this?
I know Linux has full read/write support for NTFS, but is it able to use NTFS journaling, and would the permissions break? I know there is an ext3 driver for Windows, if that's any good.

This is off-topic, but I'm just curious for information's sake: Are there any Linux distros that can fully boot from an NTFS partition?

wouldn't it be easier to just create a new partition and move all of those files to the new partition then both OS's should be able to ealy access them.
I have done this with windows , my linux sysem can access all of my files that are on my other partition from my laptop and my media PC. mind you I had allot of help from these forums doing this .

Which is going to be the primary OS, i.e. which will you be using most? When I started dual booting my goal was to make Linux be the primary so thats why i choose a Linux native FS and made windows conform to it. I created one partition for each os then one for /home and then would mount it in Windows and pointed my user profile there. That way when I eventually got off of windows everything would be laid out already they way I have it today running Linux only.

Well, I'm going to use Linux most, but I want Windows to have good support also and not choke when I try to read it. How good are the Windows ext3/4 drivers? Can I make my Windows home folder point to an ext3 location?

It's been a while since I used a Win ext* IFS and they may have improved somewhat, but I recall it seeming like a bit of a kludge, and I would much rather trust my data to Linux NTFS support than the other way around.

I moved all of my stuff to an NTFS partition, and I'm doing a fresh install of Linux Mint 16, but I'm getting errors. When I start the installer and get to the part where it says "Installing system" I get a few hundred lines of this:
where the #s are numbers. and the installer just does nothing. How do I fix this?

EDIT: I rebooted and the installation went fine. Typical Linux errors -- Doing the same exact thing repeatedly produces different results.

So how do I do that fstab magic that automatically mounts my data partition? Windows is on /dev/sda1, Linux is on /dev/sda2, and the data partition is on /dev/sda3.

EDIT: After installing Linux, I rebooted and tried to boot Windows, but GRUB gives me an invalid signature message. Trying to research this problem, but any help will be appreciated.