FAT32, EXT2, or NTFS?

[tjfitz]

My pc is a dual boot machine, Gentoo linux and Windows 2000. I'm not willing to part with either of these OSes yet; however, I have a large partition that must be readable and writable by both Windows and Linux. Currently, it is formatted with the FAT32 filesystem, but it is slightly less than 40GB, so FAT32 is painfully inefficient (not to mention file size limits and how easy it is to break it). There is a nice little Windows driver called "ext2fsd" that seems popular but is still in "alpha" on sourceforge, so I'm a little leary of using it on anything important. On the other hand, there is NTFS support under linux, but it is also quite sketchy and incomplete. So what I want to know is should I convert to ext2 or NTFS, or should I just leave it as is?

[/dev/random]

Your best bet would be to leave it as it is unless there's a safe way to convert it to ext2fs (not ext3). NTFS is only writable if you want to rename files or replace them with a file the same size or something odd like that, it's not fully writable in Linux yet.

[cokey]

yeah, FAT32 is the best bet. Windows does not see linux filesystems, even partition magic will only see linux swap and ext2
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[Fitzsimmons]

I concur. Leave it at fat32 -- if the block sizes are bothering you that much, you could try partitioning it down a little.

Completely unrelated: I'm fairly sure ext3 is backwards compatable with ext2, however I'm not sure to what degree (if opened with an ext2 driver the journals are probably ignored).

[tjfitz]

Thanks for all your responses. I think I'll just leave it alone. Honestly, block size isn't bothering me THAT much (not yet anyway, but I still have plenty of room left, too...). And actually, ext2fsd can read ext3 partitions, but it can't write to them.

[/dev/random]