multi boot questions

[strax]

Hello,

I am getting a new hard drive and am planning to use it as my boot drive. I will move my existing xp and suse installations to this drive. Now that i have lots of space, i also plan to install and play with with debian and maybe fedora and or win 7.

Q#1: Currently I am using a fat32 partion as a share between windows and suse. I recently had a problem with the 4gb file size limit on fat32. Now I wonder if it would be safe to use ext2 or ext3 as a share, using the installable etcfs in windows. I suppose i could also use ntfs, it seems very stable now. I hope to move completly away from windows in time, so i dont really want to use fat32 or ntfs. -What do you recommend?


Q#2: If i do install 2 or 3 different linux distributions, should i install the first ones without installing grub and then install grub with the last one? or should i install grub with each, or with none and install grub when finished with all?

any other advice is wellcome and apreciated.

best,

strax

[Rubberman]

To share files between Windoze and Linux, use an NTFS partition. Linux can handle that just fine, but ext2/ext3 support on Windoze is limited.

[Dapper Dan]

I agree with Rubberman. For transferring large files DO NOT use fat32 as your files can simply disappear into thin air! NTFS is a much better option when you have support for it.

When using two or more distros I always stick with the first Linux install's boot loader. Then, it's a simple matter of just telling it where to boot from on subsequent Linux installs.