sharing a partition

I have a single drive laptop where I have Windows and Fedora core installed. I have also created a small partition when installing windows in the hopes of saving files to it from both windows and linux. what I don't understand (and I am a newbie) is how do I see the partition from linux so I can easily save files to it. I hope this doesn't sound like a stupid question.

Thanks.....

the problem you'll have with transferring files b/w windows and linux is that windows can't read a partition that is compatible for windows to write to and linux can't write to an ntfs partition as M$ wont give away any of their secrets, including how the NTFS file system works exactly. so as of right now, all thats possible is for linux to read an ntfs partition but to do this, you have to install something.. http://linux-ntfs.sf.net ..go there, scroll down and click on "download(s?)" under "NTFS RPMs". click on the link for your distro, and download the rpm for your kernel version. make sure you get the right one for your cpu also.. any newer cpu (i believe) is an i686 (newer = in the past 2 years.. i have an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ and its i686).

then the only way that i can think of to transfer files from linux to windows would be to upload them to the web like on angelfire.com and then download them when you boot back to windows. its a hassle, i know.. but M$ is the devil.. haha..also when you compress files in linux, you do so to formats such as .tar.gz or .tar.bz2...you can compress to .zip or download the necessary files from rarlabs.com to compress to rar, but theres a pretty handy decompression tool called PowerZip. its for windows and it can read like 7 different formats i believe it said, including the tars, rars, and zips.. haha.

hope this helps

I have a seperate partition formatted as FAT32, which Linux can read and write to. This in my opinion is the best way to go. Also write support for NTFS exists but is reportedly not perfect. However there are tools to read linux partitions for Windows.

You can then mount the partition as
mount -t vfat /dev/hda3 /windows
Note. Here hda3 is the partition to mount and /windows is the directory you would like to mount to. Also root access is needed to mount it, unless it's in your fstab and has user permissions.

If you need to mount it often you can add an fstab entry.

For ReiserFS there is:
http://p-nand-q.com/download/rfstool.html
If your into GUI's there's also a gui for that too on the site. I've used this program personally and I've found that it it's perfectly fine.

For Ext2:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd
Note. I have not personally used this, I just found it from Google.

ok....so once I do that .... then what. I looked in my hardware browser and my partition is hda5. so I did
mount -t vfat/dev/hda5/windows

is that right??
the cursor just jumped down to the next line when I hit enter
[root@localhost ~]#

if that is right....now how do I see the partition in Linux...I seem to have a difficult time finding things. Again I am VERY new. I am really teaching myself alot of this....

Thanks for the reply and the help

The command should have been:
mount -t vfat /dev/hda5 /windows

Including the spaces. Before you do that though you'll need to make a directory /windows:
mkdir /windows

Then once you've mounted it you should be able to access the partition by going to /windows. Note you need to have root permissions for this, until you change the permissions.