One problem when using multiple different operating systems on your PC appears when you save your work files all over your OS’s and each operating system has different file system support.
Some time ago, one solution was to use a FAT32 partition to store all your common files (because both Windows and Linux has native support for FAT32) but this is pretty unpractical and FAT32 is limited.
Ext3 -> NTFS
Nowadays, many Linux distributions have NTFS support included (and it was not an easy thing to do, considering that NTFS is closed-source) and if they don’t ntfs-3g is the solution. So, you could easily access your Windows partitions just by mounting them (some Linux distro’s mount all your NTFS partitions automatically by default). Thus, a second solution to the problem is using a NTFS partition just for holding common data between your OS’s.
NTFS -> Ext3
The last solution to our problem is accessing your ext2/ext3 partitions from Windows. Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t have native support for ext3, but you could use fs-driver for that (it is actually made for ext2 partitions, but ext3 is ext2 + journaling, so it will work fine).
Other partition types
- HFS+ – a file system used by Apple for their Mac OS and iPod – it can be accesed from Windows with the help of filesystem drivers like MacDrive (commercial) or HFSExplorer (free). Also, Apple released read-only HFS+ drivers for new versions of Windows (XP,Vista,7) in Snow Leopard.
On Linux, all you have to do is mount the partition:
mount -t hfsplus /...
The bad news is that you have to disable journaling if you want to write to the partition, otherwise it would be read-only.
An alternative comes from Ardis – they claim to provide full access to HFS+ partitions; it is a beta release (last updated in 2005), so use at your own risk. - JFS – a free file system developed by IBM for 64bit machines – while Linux has native support for it, the only way it can be accessed from Windows seems to be using your Linux in a virtual machine and sharing the drive using Samba/FTP
- XFS – a high-performance file system developed by Silicon Graphics – again, supported natively by Linux; if using Windows, and olt alternative was crossmeta, but now the site doesn’t seem to be working (you could still find old versions of the program on the Internet)
- ReiserFS – the first journaling file system included in the standard kernel – supported by Linux, for Windows you can find several programs from which to access your ReiserFS partitions – the easiest seems to be YAReG
- UFS/FFS – used on Solaris and BSD systems – not all Linux distributions have full access to UFS partitions, distro’s like Ubuntu being able just to read from them (and write, if you disable journaling); as for Windows, tools like ufs2tools can get the job done, both for ufs1 and ufs2
