Welcome to LQ!
If my understanding of your question is correct, the
best thing to share is a FAT32 Windows partition.
Because Windows can't read Linux filesystems, but
Linux can read/write to Windows FAT filesystems.
Setup your Linux OS with a swap partition of 512MB,
a / (root) partition of 5GB, and the rest for /home
To share files between Linux and Windows, change your
Windows FAT32 partition to make it r/w in Linux:
Code:
/dev/hda3 /DATA vfat user,umask=1000,rw,auto 1 0
Change /dev/hda3 to match your FAT32 partition,
and change /DATA to match the name of your mount point.