Partition Advice
 

I have finally decided how I want to lay out my hard drive.

Specs: 80gb Hard Drive
AMD ATHLON 2400+
512mb RAM

-Windows XP Home (NTFS) - 30gb
- SuSE Linux 9.1 Personal (EXT2) - 25gb
- Linux SWAP Space - 2gb
-Share Partition (FAT32) - 18gb

How can I go about mounting the Linux disk onto Windows?
Should I adjust anything?
I am using GRUB.
Any suggestions? Anything I should change?

I want Windows and Linux to have complete read/write access on each others drives. I have Ext2FSD, but It gives me errors when I try to mount the Linux partition. I have Partitonmagic but I keep getting an error that "Cannot read partition drive letter"

I really enjoy this forum and always get alot of good help. I appreciate your help in advanced. Thank you.

A small bit of advice: a 2GB swap partition is way too big--you are just wasting hard drive space. I know that the old rule says 2x RAM, but that rule dates back to the days when we didn't have GBs of RAM at our disposal. For a desktop, I've never seen any reason to have more than 512MB of Swap or so--no matter how much RAM you have (unless you are the type to run 30 big programs at once in the background while you play Doom3). In fact, I've never seen my machine use hardly any Swap at all. That being said, if you are nervous 1GB would be more than enough.

I'm not sure about mounting a Linux partition into Windows, sorry.

True, I don't think Windows support many (more likely none) Linux file system but Linux supports fat and ntfs. In the 2.6 kernel there is also writesupport for ntfs. But why do you need to get acess to Linux from Win? If you have many movies or stuff like that, why not put them in the fat-partition so both OS can acess them?

well i haven't done anything to the comp yet

i know there are programs you can use to mount ext2 filesystems in windows such as:
EXT2FSD
Paragon EXT2FS Anywhere ($30)
and a few others.

I guess I will take your advice on the swap space. I probably will lower it to 768mb of swap.

for the windows xp should i use NTFS or FAT32
same for the shared position.

i really appreciate the help!
im a somewhat newbie

The shared partition should be FAT32 because as of right now Linux can only read NTFS safely--it can't write to NTFS partitions (I probably should say, "You really shouldn't write to a NTFS drive with Linux--you might corrupt the drive and lose info").

Windows XP prefers NTFS but it will run on either that or FAT32, so your choice. I think that NTFS is more stable and secure than FAT so probably go with that one.

There is a project called ext2fsd for mounting ext2/ext3 partitions in windows. It does work... but I wouldn't recommend mounting read-write (it defaults to read-only).

http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/