What filesystem should I use?
 

On my desktop at home I want to set it up to run multiple operating systems so that I can test different distros and the like. I need Windows XP (until I can fully ween myself from it....almost complete except for MS Money), and I want to run SuSE 9.1 Pro (Easy to install and works great out of the box). I would also like to run Debian and whatever else....These would be installed on a 40GB drive.

I have a second drive that I use for data storage (music, videos, general files, etc). It is 160GB. SuSE doesn't have write access to NTFS out of the box like it does with FAT32, but XP can only use a FAT32 partition up to 32GB. XP can't see any linux filesystem. I've read that NTFS write access in linux is still "experimental."

What would be a good solution so that I could read/write the large drive from all OS's? If I decide to junk XP and go linux only will other distros work OK with reiser (SuSE default)?

I also thought of just running XP within a virtual machine (VMware), but I'm not sure if I can give it access to a physical disk or only a virtual disk, in which case it would not have access to all the data on that drive.

It is best to keep the 160GB drive formatted as NTFS. Mount the partition(s) as read-only. When you need to modify a file, copy the file over to the Linux partition and proceed with your modifications. In Windows, use explore2fs to copy the file back over. A little more work, but much less chance of data corruption.

Most distributions have reiserfs support right from the start so no need to worry there.

you are able to get full reliable ntfs write support using captive, http://freshmeat.net/projects/captive/

Thanks for the suggestions. I shall give captive a try.