linux/windows dual boot

[kethwika]

I have a 160 gb hard drive and a 200 gb hard drive and I want to dual boot windows and a linux installation linspire. the deal right now is that I have a 20 gb partition for windows and a 160 gb partition for all my files and a 180 gb partition for backup. I would like to make a 20 gb partition for linux a 20 gb partition for windows and then the rest for my files. I want linux and windows to be able to both read and write to my files drive. Basically one hard drive for all the files and two others for the operating system. Just let me know if this is possible and if someone could write some general instructions for it. Thanks

 

[Drake]

It's possible but a hassle. Windows and Linux only share native FAT32 rewrite capabilities.

Captive NTFS allows you to safely write to an NTFS partition, but I do not know how efficient this is.

 

[neo86]

Captive NTFS is a lot slower since it's emulating the Windows kernel. I have experienced occasional corruption with it, but it was easily fixed with a check disk from the recovery console on the Windows setup disk.