somethinbg about OS

[kris.c]

hi all,
I am still a student and I still havent had any formal caoching on OS.. I have installed WIN XP and SUSE LINUX on my pc.,when i am working in XP,i can see the files that I create in linux and other way around too. I am not able to understand how this is possible as I have actually partitioned my hard disk before I installed linux.. Can some one explain how this is happening.But, on some other machines, i have observed that the files in one OS are invisible to the other OS...
thanks

[TheNSS]

The cause for this is that the partitions were fomatted the same. In my box I have Vista and xp, in xp, I can see the files I have in Vista, In vista , I can see the files in xp, it just happens.

[DMR]

Whether or not data on any given partition can be viewed by an OS depends upon 2 things:

1. With which filesystem the partition was formatted.
2. Whether or not the OS in question supports that filesystem.

* Windows-native filesystems are FAT and NTFS; Windows itself does not recognize Linux filesystems at all, although third-party utilities can provide that functionality.

* The most common Linux-native filesystems are EXT2, EXT3, and ReiserFS. Linux supports a much wider variety of filesytems than that, including Windows filesystems; Linux has full (native) read/write support for FAT, and read suppport for NTFS. NTFS write support can be enabled, but it is not recommended as the feature is technically still only "experimental".

The fact that you can "see" your SuSE partition from Windows most likely means that you formatted the SuSE partition with the FAT32 filesystem (it ispossible to install Linux on a FAT32 partition).