Can I have a NTFS data partition both accessible (r/w) by separate Windows and Ubuntu partitions?

Question

The following image illustrates the partition setup I have in my head, but what I'm unsure about is the data partition.

I've heard Linux support for NTFS is fairly good nowadays, but since it is ultimately reverse engineered it is still not perfect. Is there a possibility I could lose data when Ubuntu is accessing it? And should I follow a different method to share files?

Thanks :)

Answer 1

The short answer is Yes.

What I did is that in Ubuntu, I modified the default location of the Documents, Pictures, Video folders etc. to point to folders on the Data parititon, by changing the ~/.config/user-dirs.dir file.

It goes without saying that the Data partition needs to be mounted at boot. So you will have to add it to your /etc/fstab file. There should be a line which should look something like this:

/dev/sda7   /mnt/Data   ntfs    uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=027,fmask=137   0   0

Where /dev/sda7 is the partition location and /mnt/Data is where it is mounted.

In Windows, you can also personalise the location of the standard folders. This depends on your Windows version. Google it and you'll find how.

Answer 2

My whole family has always found it easiest to share massive amounts of data via an NTFS partition since ownership doesn't matter on NTFS. It is on a computer that had Windows installed originally and though I hardly ever use it the partition is also available to Windows. I have done this on half a dozen computers since 8.04 and have never had a problem. On computers where Windows is the primary OS, I typically just use one of the Windows directories as the transfer point since I can just as easily mount the Windows boot disk (partition) for use in Ubuntu, note however that this method only works one direction (I can't access the Ubuntu boot partition from Windows).