Been searcing quite a bit on this. I'm moving to a Win2K/Mandrake dual boot machine. My config is going to be two 80 gig drives, and I was hoping to do the following:
Drive 1 (C): two partitions, one for Mandrake, one for Win2K NTFS
Drive 2 (D): Shared between the OSes, so I was going to do FAT32

My main question- I'd rather use NTFS on the shared drive (D). I know that 9.2 can read NTFS, and there seem to be mixed results writing to NTFS. I'm also a little unsure on how Windows is going to like having a two-drive system with both FAT32 and NTFS (although the Microsoft support site seems to say this is OK), and was wondering if I should partition drive 2 (D) into FAT32 and NTFS partitions, using the FAT32 partition as a way to transfer files between the operation systems.

Anyone have any suggestions? It's my first linux install since college (10+ years ago..) and am a little rusty! Thanks!

Andrew

I would do just what you said, use fat32 as a share partition. But my preference would be to partition drive a into NTFS and a fat32 partition, with win installed on NTFS part. Then, just install Linux on drive b and mount the fat32 on boot. I just prefer to have 'em on separate drives. But what you said there will work.

hmm, that's a good idea as well. Only prob is that I do a lot of music recording as well as big statistical anayses, so I wanted to keep all of the data on one drive to reduce fragmentation of the program/OS files.

Ok, I see. You need a large data drive. Your original plan is most efficient. Install windows first and then install grub ont the 1st sector of the boot partition (not the MBR) when you install linux next to windows. Keep second drive as fat32. Any fragmentation there will not affect win2k performance.