I have an external USB hard drive with multiple partition. I am trying to configure one single partition (over 32 GB) to read and write from Windows XP laptop and Linux Desktop when connected to the machine directly.
Question:
a) Is it possible to swap drives between machines and read/write from the same partition.
b) If yes what is the best partition type to use ?
c) Does it make a difference if the drive is formated on Linux v/s XP?

FYI: Here is why I am trying to do this...
I had created a partition /dev/sda4 of type 7 (HPFS/NTFS) and mounted it successfully on the Red Had Linux m/c. It's configured as a Samba drive. I was able to read write from my XP laptop but writing(over 4 GB files) is very slow over the home WI-FI. My thought, since this partition is on an external drive it will be faster to just swap the drive between two machines and write large files to it.

My Configuration is as below.
Laptop with XP
Desktop with Red Hat Linux ver 2.4.20-8.
Disk partition /dev/sda4
Partition type : 7 (HPFS/NTFS)
Size : 57 GB.

Any suggestion is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

a yes
b for windows fat32 or ntfs is suggested, but nowadays windows can handle ext4 also, so you can use your favorite.
c hopefully not, but someone suggests to use the original os (ext4 on linux, fat and ntfs on windows)

Ok it is not working.
I fdisk'ed the partition on linux and set it to type 7 (HPFS/NTFS). Saved it and then moved the drive to XP machine. I could not read the partition. So I went thru the disk manager and made the partition active and formated it for NTFS. Save a file to it to test and worked fine.
Next moved the drive back to Linux and tried to mount the partition (mount /dev/sda4/ mnt/sda4/) and got a message "mount: fs type ntfs not supported by kernel." My kernel version is 2.4.20-8. Is Kernel my issue? Do I need a newer Kernel ?

Ok I got it to work.
Here is how..
a) Tried partition type to 'b' or '7'. Both worked.
b) On linux formated disk with
mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/partition_name
c) Mounted the partition with
mount /dev/partition_name /mnt/partition_name

glad to hear that. So you only need to say thanks if you got valuable help...