I took my own advice today. Here's what I did:

1. Logged into Windows.
2. Fired up Partition Magic 8.

My current setup:
- 40 GB Windows C:\
- 10GB /
- 500MB Swap
- 29GB /home

3. I resized the primary partition containing Windows XP down to 20GB. I let Partition Magic 8 move my entire disk contents forward so that the empty space would be unallocated at the end of the disk. To get it to do that, I simply unchecked the other partitions as not being candidates to receive a portion of the free space left over.

4. I rebooted and chose to go into Windows (you have to babysit it if Linux is your default boot or PM will try to reboot suddenly and Linux will boot)

5. PM resized the partition and moved everything.

6. Rebooted into Windows -still worked - drive now 20GB
7. Rebooted into Linux - still works - everything as it was before but further up the disk by 20GB
8. Rebooted into Windows
9. Used Partition Magic to create 20GB of Fat32 space at the end of the drive
10. It worked while still in Windows. When finished, I created a text file and put it in the new drive F: on My Computer.
11. Rebooted into Linux
12. It could not see the share drive.
13. Tried to manually mount it using $ mkdir /mnt/share; mount -t vfat /dev/hde8 /mnt/share
14. Success!
15. Cannot access /mnt/share
16. MISTAKE: Rebooted to Windows, suspicious that Windows XP filesharing settings had perhaps encrypted the drive. Right clicked drive and told windows toshare it.
17. Rebooted into Linux - still not visible.
18. CORRECTION: Rebooted into Windows and undid the file sharing to keep my controls tight on what might be the cause
19. Rebooted into Linux - everything still worked - nothing mounted on /mnt/share
20. Read an article about a file called /etc/fstab by searching in Google for "mount fat32 partition access denied"
21. Edited /etc/fstab as superuser. Added a line I copied from the article
22. Saved /etc/fstab
23. Rebooted Linux
24. There was the test file! I edited the test file.
25. Rebooted into Windows.
26. I saw the edits and edited again.
27. Rebooted into Linux. I saw more edits and could still edit.

I now have a 20GB share drive to put my MP3's on so I can get to them from either OS, and a place where my wife (brainwashed by Bill Gates still - but I'm working on her) can access files and I can too - a shared space.

Plus, it's like I stole 20GB from Windows! LOL!

Learning Linux is all about reading and learning through experiments. I read the following while learning how to do this:

http://linux.about.com/library/bl/op...ewbie4.2.2.htm
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...004/05/1/99577

If I can do it, any idiot can do it.

Now I have:
- 20 GB Windows C:\
- 10GB /
- 500MB Swap
- 29GB /home
- 20 GB /mnt/share (drive e:\)

A person above said a lot about having to use the command line in Linux etc. Honestly, people are going to disagree with me, but if you want something that just works with no command line or anything like that, go the Xandros or Linspire route. Xandros has a free edition, but it doesn't have much software. I used Linspire for 2 weeks, and it does work pretty good, altho it is not as stable as my current SuSE distro. In the end, however, I felt limited and wanted something different, which is what caused me to switch to Fedora, then later to SuSE. If you go with Linspire, go to tryoutlinux.com. It gives you a coupon code so that you can get Linspire CD plus a year subscription to the Warehouse for the same price as just a Linspire CD buying it normalluy. Or if you do very little on your computer (word processing, music and basic stuff like that), you'll appreciate the Open Circulation Edition of Xandros. But, if you like the command line and wanna play around a bit, go with the SuSE FTP install (reply if you need instructions on installing) and if you like it you can buy a boxed set at a later date.

EDIT: Take the time to install SuSE via FTP. DON'T use the personal iso download, it sucks compared to the pro via FTP.

well to anyone who checks out this old thread I am happyt to say that I dual booted and am able to mount the shared partition in linux just fine. thanks for all the help from everyone!