Note: TL;DR, scroll to bottom for summary. I recently set up my computer for a dual boot between Ubuntu 9.10 and Windows 7. My current drive setup is as follows.

| A1 |     A2       |
| B1    |  B2  | B3 |

A1: 100 mb, windows 7 "System Reserved" boot partition

A2: 230 gb, data section, this one needs to be shared between the operating systems

B1: 125 gb, windows 7 OS

B2: 123 gb, ubuntu OS

B3: 2gb, linux swap space

Pretty much i want to have my documents, music, pictures, videos, etc accessible from both operating systems. My first attempt involved making the data (a2) partition NTFS, and moving my home folder from ubuntu to the data partition. However, as I read NTFS does not work nice with permission, and it messed up my home folder. My next idea is one of the following: 1) format the data partition to ext2/3/4 and move my home folder from linux there, and get a driver to read ext partitions in windows 7. The problem with that is that most of the ext drivers/software are not compatible with windows 7 or do not integrate with windows explorer (I really don't want to open a separate software window just to access my data, plus it's probably not compatible with other software.) http://www.fs-driver.org/ looks promising, but I'm not sure how it works with ext4 and windows 7 (not officially supported, when trying in vista compatibility mode, it tells me I need to format the ext drive to use it). My next idea, 2) keep the home folder in ubuntu where it is, but create symlinks for the Documents, Music, etc folders to an NTFS formatted Data (A2) partition, and add those locations to the windows 7 libraries. I'm not totally sure how the permissions would work out, but it should be fine since it's only the documents, music, etc and not the important config files in the rest of /home/user/. Correct me if I'm wrong. Currently, symlinks is my best idea, although i'm not sure how it will work.

Any suggestions, additions to my ideas, links, pointers, whatever would be greatly appreciated. Even if it means i should reformat both my drives and repartition (2 250gb drives if you want to suggest a setup for that), I won't be too opposed if that's the best suggestion (I've gone through the format/install/format/reinstall process 5 times over the past 3 days, once more won't hurt me).

TL;DR, summary: I have two hard drives. One is partitioned for Ubuntu and Windows 7, the second one I want accessible to both operating systems to store documents, music, pictures, videos, etc. Suggestions on how to set up the data drive please =)

P.S. bonus if I can get an apache server document root folder working between the two OS's as well (permissions could become very complicated, so don't worry too much about that)

P.P.S. Related question, but data viewing is one way: http://superuser.com/questions/84586/partition-scheme-and-size-for-dual-boot-windows-7-and-ubuntu-9-10-with-separate-p