Dual boot Arch + Windows one shared space

I have this in the Arch linux forum as well, but thought I put it here to get more ideas



My ordered 500Gb HD is coming tomorrow morning, so I thought I'd plan a good strategy for my filesystems. I'm currently running Arch + XP but made the serious mistake of making /home ext4, which means I can't use ext2fs or similar programs to access /home from XP. That means everytime I need to access data in Linux I have to reboot from XP. Urgh.

I was flirting on the idea of putting NTFS for C: for Windows, ext4 for "/" and NTFS for "/home", for /home to be a shared drive. Is this wise? I know NTFS is pretty looked down upon in the Linux world, but I wanted to run my Windows games from that shared folder as well as my documents and stuff. I've tried using ext2fs to access an ext3 /home from XP, but some games just wouldn't install properly. I've seen the psychocats guide for dual booting, but that's not really what I'm looking for.


I'm also thinking of having /boot as ext2. Does this have a significant impact on boot speeds? Or does it just save the space from journalling? What size for /boot would you suggest? Should I do stuff like /var, etc?



So I'll give:
??Mb for /boot
10Gb for /
2Gb for /swap
rest for /home
10Gb for C: (Is that too little?)

Are there any other wise suggestions? I want to try to streamline the whole thing as much as possible.

 

I've read someone it's NOT a good idea to use /home as ntfs....can't think of now...gotta run....someone else will remember though I understand your logic because I've been at that crossroad myself

 

I dunno about Arch, but if you try to use NTFS as /home in Ubuntu, you'll get an error that it's not a valid Unix filesystem or something to that effect.