

sda4 - Shared partition between Ubuntu and Windows (NTFS or FAT32 Format) At the end it should look something like this: This partition will also be the one that will share the information between both, Windows and Ubuntu, not /home. For your case, you should create another partition (Either by taking free space not used by files from an already created partition or using another hard drive) and THIS partition should be the one that is formatted as FAT32/NTFS. So no matter which one you decide, both will be supported between both systems and you can have a shareable partition/disk between Ubuntu and Windows.įor several security and performance related issues, /home should never be FAT32 or NTFS. I even wrote an answer to the support NTFS has in Ubuntu. You can actually do this from Ubuntu if you want using for example GPARTED which is found in the Software Center or the Disks utility which comes installed by default. So this is the reason to stick with either FAT32 or NTFS. Heck, in Windows if you try to access that drive it will offer an option to format the drive to NTFS. Just to add, if you do it with another type of partition like ext4, btrfs or any other that Windows does not support natively then the files will work in Ubuntu but not in Windows. Since Windows systems support FAT32 and NTFS "out of the box" (And only those two for your case) and Linux supports a whole range of them including FAT32 and NTFS, it is highly recommended to format the partition or disk you want to share in either FAT32 or NTFS, but since FAT32 has a file size limit of 4.2 GB, if you happen to work with huge files, then it is better you use NTFS.
