If you have a dual-boot Windows/Linux system, you probably know this problem: you can access files from your Windows installation while you are in Linux, but not the other way round. This tutorial shows three ways how you can access your Linux partitions (with ext2 or ext3 filesystem) from within Windows:

http://www.howtoforge.com/access-linux-par...ns-from-windows
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This post has been edited by dserban: Jun 3 2008, 07:17 PM

This is really great, it always was a problem, I remember when accessing NTFS from Linux was quite a problem, but now you can do it with quite a good speed and you can even write to it with great performance, tried it myself.. It still doesn't say anything about the speed? How fast could I for example download a 2 GB file from a Linux partition in Windows using those tools? and I guess it is only readable? or I can write to those partitions too?

But as I understood with Ext2 Installable File System For Windows you can do everything, delete, move, write and modify..

I use Ext2 IFS but it occasionally bluescreens me. It can also cause my system to freeze, although this is quite rare (but I don't access the Linux partition from Windows much anyways). The only time I actually needed to use this was to move a folder because of an improper mounting, couldn't log into Linux.

The speed is a bit slow, you can actually tell, but not notably slow.

I would say that the goal for these interoperating systems is to save place, using the same files under Linux and under Windows. So, the interest for instance would be to send to a friend your picture from your last holidays, using your Crosoft Messenger when booting under Windows, but the file to be sent being on your Linux partition.
Or downloading a Linux rpm while connected to windows (I simultaneously download the Windows version and the Linux Version of the Oracle patchsets for instance), and when booting under Linux I install the linux rpms which are physically on the Windows disk, without having to copy them.

So you actually use this? Does it work good? What I mean by that is are there any system crashes when accessing/writing to the partition?

Don't want to startup polemics, but... a W___dows system which does not crash, who has seen that ? I see one every time I install a system from stratch, and then, as soon as I start surfing on the web I start experiencing crashes, and I support it until I feel sick an reload my sysbackup.
Now, if your question concerns my own way of working, I do this that way :
a) Windows system on a FAT32 partition, so I can virus-scan it when booting off my ms-dos bootable cdrom (just for diagnositcs purpose in case of giant panic).
three NTFS partitions for Windows-only things (videocompression or things like that).
c) One FAT32 partition for cooperative disk-sharing.
d) When I am satisfied with the windows system settings, I boot off the Mandrake Linux CD.
e) During the Mandrake install I choose "install on the remaining space on the hard drive", and it automatically creates the Linux filesystems, and automatically mounts all the Windows partitions as Unix filesystems.
f) All my default Linux storages go the the FAT32 fileystems, all my default Windows storage go to the FAT32 filesystems.
When this filesystem is full, this means that some job is finished, I move the files to my USB storage disk.