I have a laptop tribooting Windows XP/Windows7/Ubuntu 12.04. What I want to do is set it up so that whether i'm using Windows or Ubuntu, all my documents are in the same place on my hdd. This would save me time and space as i would not have to browse to different folders depending on what OS i'm logged into, and I wouldn't have to store duplicate copies of files/folders. Currently, the "Users" folder for Windows is stored on a seperate partition from the OS. Can I instruct Ubuntu to use these same folders? Or should i redirect it to mount this partition as /home and then redirect Windows to thse folders for it's own use? Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

fstab holds a list of partitions and you may be able to mount your "Users" folder at the users home directory.

I do this, not with ntfs, with appended drives during recovery and for archiving.

If you do this with a ntfs partition you may need to set noatime in fstab line for that partition.

cheers

Personally I would install Ubuntu to free space and ignore the users partition during the install. Then when everything was set up I would mount the partition to somewhere in /media/ and put a link to this in home.
This may not apply to you but because of the way drives seem to be seen in a different order every boot I tend to use UUIDS in fstab: http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?ti...ID_and_Volumes

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I did the same recently on a friend's laptop that had windows preinstalled.
Two traps I walked right into that you can avoid:

1) Make sure that you mount the windows partition in fstab, not only in the running session, before bind mounting the windows user directory to some folder in your home.
Otherwise it will struggle on the next boot because the bind mount will be pointing to a volume that won't be mounted yet.

2) If you do not have a separate data partition but want to mount the windows user directory path you will have to deal with whitespaces in the path. Define such paths in fstab like described in this post to make it properly recognize the whitespaces.

Thanks guys. You've all been really helpful. You've given me some ideas on how to clean up this mess I have here and I think I can take your suggestions and formulate them into a solution. I'll post what I come up with.