filesystems & shared partitions
 

I ran SuSE 9 for a while and feel pretty comfortable with linux now and decided to switch to slackware. I was planning on backing up all my data and completely wiping the drive, setting up a small partition for xp, another small partition for slack, and keep the rest a large data drive (music, movies, documents, etc). I know fat32 has read/write from both linux and xp, but I didn't know about the 32GB limitation, so now I'm reconsidering my setup. Anyways, I have 220gb total storage, and I'm wondering how to divide it up, and what filesystems to use...

-FAT32 can supposedly store up to 2TB, so I could format my 160gb drive fat32, but I understand the cluster size will be enormous and performance will generally suck.

-xp can have read/write access to ext2 (and maybe ext3?) with some drivers i've seen posted here, but some say that writing to an ext drive from windows is about as risky as writing to ntfs from linux :/

So I could format the data drive totally in fat32 or ext2 or 3, but I kind have the feeling that would be a bad idea. The only other option I can see is giving windows and linux both a good chunk of the drive (in ntfs and ext3 or reiserfs) and creating a smaller fat32 drive to swap stuff between them as needed.

There may be other ways to do this, I hear people talk about SAMBA, but I'm not quite sure what it does, and I think it only works for network drives, correct? Anyways,

Too long, didn't read summary:
Is there any nice way to give both linux and windows read/write to a large (100gb+) partition?

Several FAT32 partitions? Or, make a big NTFS and a FAT32:
hda1: XP's NTFS
hda2: Linux ext3
hda3: FAT32 10gb
hda4: NTFS filling rest
Whenever you want to do something that requires read-write, you copy the files needed to the FAT32, and do it. Later you copy the stuff back to NTFS in Windows.