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I have a dual boot system and an empty hard drive. I want to access this drive from both systems. How can I achieve this?

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    IMO, the hard drive should be formatted as NTFS or exFAT, that are accessible for Windows. Otherwise you should install some third party tool for Windows, but tools like these could make a mess.
    – pa4080
    Nov 5, 2017 at 10:41
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    See the following link, which discusses this item, askubuntu.com/questions/952673/…; a common method would be the create a partition with the NTFS file system and a suitable label, for example data. See also the following links about creating a line in /etc/fstab to mount it, askubuntu.com/questions/960156/… and askubuntu.com/questions/11840/…
    – sudodus
    Nov 5, 2017 at 11:17
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    DON'T install a Windows driver that allows you to read/write to ext2/3/4 linux partitions. It WILL corrupt that partition. A NTFS partition is the way to go. Edit /etc/fstab to auto-mount it in Ubuntu.
    – heynnema
    Nov 5, 2017 at 14:15

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In my opinion, the best way might be to partition it the way you want, and format any partition you want accessible by both Win and Linux as NTFS. [Edit: As pa4080 pointed out in the comments, exFAT would work as well]

Windows will recognize it without issue. In Linux, you may need to open the "Disks" utility and navigate to the partition, select settings, and set it to automatically mount the volume at boot time. Unless you want to manually mount it as needed - in which case it should appear in your file manager as a device.

A word of caution when using windows. To prevent windows from locking the volume, disable hibernation and, always perform a complete shutdown before booting into Linux. This is the setup I use for multiple NTFS volumes, and at least that part of the config hasn't given me any problems.

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    Could even consider writing it to the fstab on Linux (as @sudodus pointed out) because at least for me the automatic mount never worked with my HDD. And anyway it should be avoided to put any basic system requirements on this shared drive only data that's not critical necessary for any of the two systems.
    – derHugo
    Nov 5, 2017 at 12:17

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