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I'm getting a PC with Windows and I want to dual boot using Ubuntu as my primary OS.

I want to create a Home partition to store all my files and hopefully be able to access them on Windows 7 without having to manually mount the partition or anything.

I want to know what kind of partition should I create and if I can share my Home partition to simplify matters.

Thanks

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5 Answers 5

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Instead of trying to access Ubuntu from Windows - why not just access Windows from Ubuntu? Windows support for EXT4 is slim at best - however, Ubuntu (and Linux) can easily read, write, and manipulate NTFS partitions. Simple add your Windows partition to your fstab file so it'll be mounted every time you boot then delete things like Music, Movies, Pictures, etc (Files that you want to share between the two OSes) Then create symlinks to their respective folders in the mounted Windows Partition.

By doing so all your files when saved in Ubuntu will actually be saved on your Windows partition so come the next time you need to reboot into Windows they will be there waiting for you.

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  • I ended up doing this. However I couldn't manage to automount the NTFS partition in Ubuntu. I tried the regular programs and they didn't work.
    – Lisandro Vaccaro
    Jun 23, 2011 at 22:19
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Try http://www.fs-driver.org/ for drivers that will allow Windows to view ext partitions.

Your Win7 partition should appear in Ubuntu and you can use the Mount app to mount it automatically at startup.

Hope that helps.

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    I saw from that site's page that it supports Ext2 and Ext3 filesystems. I thought Ubuntu now uses Ext4 by default?
    – Knowledge Cube
    Jun 17, 2011 at 5:41
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    @WarriorIng64: that is right. Only ext2 without permissions is supported. Not suitable for daily use!
    – Takkat
    Jun 17, 2011 at 5:55
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    @WarriorIng64 You're absolutely correct! That little detail evaded me.
    – disassembler
    Jun 17, 2011 at 6:30
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Do you really need to access all files in your home from windows (there are plenty of dot directories hidden by Linux but that will be shown with Windows) ? If you just want to share you documents or pictures directories, you might create symlink from you home (ext4) to some ntfs partition.

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I'm not sure about this, but I think that Ubuntu should allow you to easily use any (including NTFS) partition as your home directory.

While installing, make sure to choose a Windows compatible partition (NTFS,FAT32) for your /home point. This would allow Windows to detect your partition and mount it.

However, remember that NTFS/FAT32 do not support permissions as well as ext4, which means you'd have to do some umasking stuff for executing files withing your home directory.

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this can be done as per this post (see the last post on the page)

BUT BEWARE!!! this is not something I'd do as the amount of things that can go wrong is astounding. Rather look at something like this.

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