Hi, I'm just wondering if some how I can partition a a little hard drive space inbetween my dual boot Unbuntu + Windows XP partitions that are right now evenly sharing space on the hard drive, so I can have a free non file system hard drive space that Ubuntu and Windows will both recognize where it becomes like a second hard drive. I only need about 5GB or so for my programming projects, web design and what not. Thanks!

i am a little confused with your question. do u mean to ask that you would like to have some files on your hard disk which you will be able to access and edit from both ubuntu as well as xp?

if so then there is a better option for u than creating a new partition.
you can install the ntfs(windows) file system on ubuntu which will allow you to access and modify each drive of windows.

also,..u can install the ext2/ext3 files systems on windows by which u will be able to access and modify all the data on your linux drives.

and if you would like to create an entire new partition.than i suggest you use the partition manager in ubuntu (i dont trust the windows one)

hope my reply helped.

You can accomplish this by setting up a shared hard drive partition using GParted in Ubuntu ( System -> Administration -> Partition Editor ). You'll probably want a FAT32 formatted partition, which is readable by both windows and linux.

Quote: Original post by mercurium
You can accomplish this by setting up a shared hard drive partition using GParted in Ubuntu ( System -> Administration -> Partition Editor ). You'll probably want a FAT32 formatted partition, which is readable by both windows and linux.

There's no reason to use FAT anymore. Just use NTFS.

Quote: Original post by Yann L

Quote: Original post by mercurium
You can accomplish this by setting up a shared hard drive partition using GParted in Ubuntu ( System -> Administration -> Partition Editor ). You'll probably want a FAT32 formatted partition, which is readable by both windows and linux.

There's no reason to use FAT anymore. Just use NTFS.

Except that NTFS-3g is supposed to be horribly slow. Nothing you'd like to do large compiles on.

Quote: Original post by Valderman
Except that NTFS-3g is supposed to be horribly slow. Nothing you'd like to do large compiles on.

You wouldn't really want to compile on FAT32 partitions either...

NTFS-3g was slow in the past, but that's not really true anymore on newer builds. While I haven't tried it as a direct compilation FS, it works very well as an exchange partition. According to their own benchmarks, it looks quite competitive. Not as fast as ext3 (obviously), but it completely obliterates FAT32 in almost all realworld situations.

Quote: Original post by Yann L

Quote: Original post by Valderman
Except that NTFS-3g is supposed to be horribly slow. Nothing you'd like to do large compiles on.

You wouldn't really want to compile on FAT32 partitions either...

True. I just use ext2ifs since I have all my data on ext3, so I can maintain the proper file permissions.