I'm wondering if it matters which file system is used for storing windows files on a linux/samba server.

I have a pc with 2 hard drives. HDA has swap and the rest of the linux system except for /home which is on HDB. HDB is a 250 GB drive. My intentions is to use /home to store files from my Windows XP computers (3 each) and to store drive images (Partition Magic?) for back of these systems. I want to be able to restore my XP computers from the Samba server if there is a crash or virus on one of them.

So does it matter? If so, which would you recommend?

I'm new here but have read quite a few of the threads and seen alot of newbies like me getting some great help.

If you intend to store all the images on your linux machine instead of on windows and mounting them, you'll have to use VFAT. Windows cannot recognize or read Linux filesystems. If you were going to store everything on Windows, it wouldn't matter -- except for the fact that NTFS is read-only in Linux, no write support.

I personally use ext3 journaling file system on my SuSE 9.2 box, and NTFS 5 on my Windows XP boxes. I only use NTFS because of the fact I mount my shares or hard drives from XP to mount points for copying over data.

Thanks to Rsmith. That got me going in the right direction!

With networking it doesn't matter what filesystem is on the server or client because samba takes care of the interface. Any journalized linux filesystem will work for the server side.