Setup Dual bood data partition and move /home

[Mr tim esquire]

Good morning all its a gorgeous day her in London hope your world is nice too

I have just spent dome time using gparted to sort out my partitions.
I have a vista partition, a fedora one and a big chunk of unallocated space I wish to use as my data drive.

I want to move my ~ folder to the new partition and have windows/vista access the folder and write to the Documents, Downloads folders etc.

What is the best format to use?

Also I plan to start backing up my partitions to a server, for instance using g4l to save a linux image (maby a windose one too). Is there any benifit in keeping all the hidden files (ones starting with period '.') i.e moving the whole ~ folder or would I be best off leaving the ~ dir and moving the folders I know i use such as ~/Downloads, ~/Documents etc?

And how should i preform the move of all these files? 'mv'? do i need to add any special options?

thanks all
Tim

[Lindy]

Windows is just brain dead enough that it can't read ext3 (your home dir would want to be ext3) , but Linux can read and write to ntfs, so if it were me I'd leave my home dir where it is and format the unallocated space to ntfs so both Windows and linux can share the space.

[JohnVV]

for fedora to boot it reads the file permissions of $HOME and if not valid , wont login to that user .
so your /home partition must be ext3 or LVM .
ntfs-3g dose a great job of read/wright to windows that a ntfs partition is fine to share data
I have a 2 disk setup so XP is on one drive( all ntfs) and fedora is on the larger drive ( all ext3)

[Bert Rolston]

Originally Posted by JohnVV

for fedora to boot it reads the file permissions of $HOME and if not valid , wont login to that user .
so your /home partition must be ext3 or LVM .
ntfs-3g dose a great job of read/wright to windows that a ntfs partition is fine to share data
I have a 2 disk setup so XP is on one drive( all ntfs) and fedora is on the larger drive ( all ext3)

I agree with John,

I set up a WIndows partition, a Linux partition (which includes /home) and a large NTFS data partition.
I redirect My Documents to the NTFS data partition then put a link in my ~/ directory.

That was until I found VirtualBox.
Now I run XP as a virtual machine and don't need to worry about NTFS partitions at all.
But that's for a different forum.