Shared data partition.

[aimeeandbeatles]

OK, so last night I managed to bork up my Linux installation and I had to reinstall. And it's a pain copying all the data over from the external. I was up till 2 am.

Second, my mom's making me reinstall Vista, at least as a dual-boot. She says its because its rent-to-own computer.

So I was thinking, is there a way to create a data partition for music/videos/documents/pictures/etc that can be shared between the two OS? Separate partition because I'm good at screwing up things. Thinking FAT32 would be most compatible.

I googled it, but I dont think I did it right as I got some networking stuff and virtual machines. Also I have to go now so I can't google more.

Thanks

EDIT: Just thought of this. In the other thread, I said that it was become my mom didn't like Linux. But I was actually wrong. It's sort of hard to tell because of the way she was yelling (I have difficulties understanding speech.)

 

[Souron]

Windows installer should allow you to create additional partitions. It might prefer NTFS, for larger partitions, but Linux should be able to read that too.

There really isn't much benifit in creating a separate partition though. You can just use the windows partition.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Well, the purpose of the data partition is so if I mess up either OS, I won't lose the files. For example, if I had my files on the Windows partition and had to reinstall Windows, I'd lose the files. Same with Linux.

So there would be three logical drives.

I have a 500 gig drive. My "data" would take up quite a bit of space because I have lots of DVD files.

Also, what on earth is Linux swap partition?

Read to avoid FAT32 as it's very unstable. Apparently there are Linux addons which allow writing to NTFS. The page was 2 years old and it was in beta then, dunno about now.

Stumbled on this.
Also found one that's fairly up-to-date! http://blog.sirupsen.dk/guides/dual-booting-windows-and-linux/

 

[Till]

Any decent linux distribution should have full NTFS read/write support.
The Linux swap partition is where data is stored which doesn't fit into the memory. It's like the pagefile in windows.

I would recommend creating two NTFS partitions and using Wubi to install Ubuntu, as GBunny suggested in the other thread. Wubi will decrease the odds of you botching the installation, and will make it easier to deal with size problems.

The more partitions you have, the likelier it becomes that you underestimate the size demands for one of them, and will have a huge hassle correcting this problem later on.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

OK, I went over to the Ubuntu forums. With their help I now got a working dual-boot system.