Journalized FS accessible from Linux and XP

Factual Questions
1

For the past 2 years, I have been ripping and encoding my CD collection to my hard drive for use in my iPod. It now takes up well over 50 GB, so I bought a new drive today for it. ($60 after rebate for a 120 GB Seagate, storage is cheap now!)

I usually run Linux and I have all of my music on the Linux partition but I dual boot into XP to run iTunes (and play Flight Simulator). I have a 5 GB FAT32 transition partion to use to transfer the files to the XP partition, so this is excessively painful.

I would like to format the new drive into a journalized file system accessible from both. FAT32 is the only FS I know that is seamlessly writable by both OSs, but it is not journalized and it has issues with file names and permissions. So two questions:

  1. Is there a journalized file system that can be seamlessly used by both OSs?
  2. If not, is there a dependable utility to write NTFS from Linux or ext3fs from XP? Or perhaps a utility for both OSs that write onto a third journalized FS? I know there are utilities and kernel compilation options but I am unclear on their dependability and the last thing I want to do is lose all of these carefully organized tracks. I am running RedHat 9.2 and it doesn’t have NTFS functionality in it. If someone can tell me if the Linux NTFS functionality is dependable I am willing to start over using something else because I’m getting kind of sick of the RedHat constraints (like it complains when I want to build my own kernel).
  3. Any non-journalized FSs that I can use for the same purpose but are better than FAT32?

The third option is to maintain another Linux box as an MP3 server in a corner somewhere running Samba so that XP can then access it. But this means fixing this old P3 that I have sitting here and leaving it on all the time (although I did have it running a web jukebox for my intranet and outputting digital audio to my AV receiver). One computer with the two drives I think will be my best option, provided I can find an appropriate FS.

2

You can read ResierFS and ext2 in Windows with third party drivers. So if you just need to read the mp3s from Windows, either of those should work. I think that the ext2 drivers will let you read ext3 as well, because it’s basically the same filesystem when you’re just reading it. As far as I know there isn’t any reliable way to write from both to anything but FAT

There’s lots of good information at the Linux-NTFS project

3

Why not buy or build a second, cheap, PC and set it up as a server? Slap Linux and Samba on it and Bob’s your uncle.