Hey Daniweb,

I a 13.3 inch Macbook Pro (5,5) running Snow Leopard that I would like to triple boot Snow Leopard, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 9.10 on. I am running an 80 GB Intel X-25M as my primary drive and I after I have the three operating systems installed via the optical drive I plan to replace the optical drive with 320 GB hard drive to use as a data drive for all of the operating systems. My question is, how should I format all of my partitions? I am assuming that on the primary drive I will have an HFS+ partition for Mac OS X, NTFS for Windows 7, and an ext3 partition for Ubuntu. Is there any format I can make the data drive so that it can read and written to by all 3 OSs? Maybe Fat32? I do plan to put movies and large files on the drive though, so the format needs to support large files and I think FAT is only up to 4GB...

Thanks for Any Help,
jpdbaugh

How are you planning to replace the optical drive with a hard disk?
Windows 7 will only install on NTFS, so your idea of all FAT32's won't work there.
I would just install OS X on a HFS+ and then use bootcamp from there.

I will have an HFS+ partition for Mac OS X, NTFS for Windows 7, and an ext3 partition for Ubuntu. Is there any format I can make the data drive so that it can read and written to by all 3 OSs? Maybe Fat32? I do plan to put movies and large files on the drive though, so the format needs to support large files and I think FAT is only up to 4GB...
SEO

NTFS should work with NTFS-3G. If you are on Snow Leopard you have to download a 64bit build of MacFUSE and then NTFS-3G.
NTFS-3G is also for Linux and Windows 7 supports NTFS out of the box.