I use Linux for most of the things but I still need Windows sometimes. So, I have Linux Mint 14 and Windows 8 installed (dual-booting) on my computer.
Here's a screenshot of the output of sudo fdisk -l command:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/37485576/fdisk%20output.png
- sda1: The 350 MB partition Windows 8 allocates (I still don't know why.)
- sda2: Windows installation
- sda3: My shared NTFS drive
- sda5: Linux Mint 14 installation
- sda6: Swap area for Linux Mint
Most of my files are in sda3 which I share between the two OSs (kind of like my backup partition). I can access to it from both operating systems. However, sometimes my files gets corrupted.
Example: I recently downloaded Eclipse and extracted it to a folder in sda3 drive in Linux Mint. It was working fine. Then when I switched to Windows, it asked me to repair my drives because there were some errors. I accepted, Windows did some scanning and restarted. When I switched back to Linux Mint, I noticed that Eclipse wasn't working. When I checked, most of the files in Eclipse folder were corrupted. Similar things happen other way around as well. Sometimes I'm not able to see and/or open files in Windows that I created/downloaded in Linux Mint. I'm tired of losing files like this.
I know this can be a hardware issue too. My computer is kind of old. But if it is not, is there a better way to share a drive than what I currently do? (a seperate NTFS partition for both)