Hi,

I'm currently dual (well tribooting) 2 linux distros and win2k. I have several partitions setup (one each for the three os's, /home, swap, and a fat32 shared. Problem, is, I'm finding it very confusing having part of my regularly access docs setup in /home and part in the shared partition.

What I'd like is a single large partition that I can share. As I see it my options are increase the size of /home with the current fat32 partition space and try to use the fs-driver.org program to access from win2k. But I'm a little worried about doing that since one experience I read about caused linux to crash (because of problems from the win side).

Second option being to shrink the /home to only contain program preferences (like /.kde, firefox, etc) and increase the fat32 partition using links within /home to access files there (so it feels like there still in /home). What are the drawbacks to doing this? Am I going to run into any stability or file reading issues? Anything else I'm overlooking?

I considered making /home the fat32 partition but I read this is a real problem for linux as it causes problems with the OS so I wrote it off.

If there are any other ways of accomplishing what I need, please feel free to pitch 'em out there.

Thanks so much in advance. I look forward to hearing your advice.

I have the same preference with you, and this is how i manage my only 40GB hardisk:

1 partition for windows(FAT32) 4GB
1 partition for openSUSE(ext3) 10GB
1 partition for swap 512MB

and the rest is an ext3 partition mounted at /data

in windows, use Ext2FS to mount,read,write ext2/ext3 partition.

you can download here:
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm

I hope this will help, although this solution may need you re-partition the whole hardisk...

Cool solution. Have you had any trouble with stability using that software to read ext3 in Windows?

EDIT: I just went and looked over the ext2ifs info and unfortunately, it says that it doesn't support writing to ext2/3. I would need this to make the shared folder work. How did you get around this?

thanks man. I also was looking for a way to get the most of my hard drive with a dual boot system. I stopped using NTFS for windows obviously because of linux. But I really just wanted to make the windows partition as small as possible and save the rest for linux. Now I can do just that. I only use windows for what windows is good for IMO: gaming (I wish developers would think of linux like Quake4) and my Music (Alsa is good but I have 7.1 in my room and alsa sucks for that with my card). Everything else like learning, programming, and all that other good stuff is with linux.

wew... I never had a problem like this.
My ext3 ran veeery smooth in my Windows XP SP2. playing games, install program, whatever.

actually, the link is not where i get ext2ifs.

here is mine:
http://www.fs-driver.org/download/Ext2IFS_1_10c.exe

probably there are some issue that solved...

good luck

sorry..double post...