Linux and NTFS
 

I was planning on installing Ubuntu onto my PC as a second OS, but I remember the last time I did this my friend (who's a real Linux geek) said I should make a FAT32 partition to use to share files between Windows and Linux, as although Linux can read from an NTFS partition, if you try to write to it bad things can happen.

What I want to know is is this still the case, and what are these 'bad things'? Is it just a case of the files you're writing themselves can be corrupted, or is it much worse (ie could my whole Windows partion get messed up?)

You can mess up the file system. It's better to use the FAT partition, as mentioned.

On the other hand, you can use ext3 drivers for windows. I've used it in the past and it worked well.

Actually, Linux and NTFS work pretty well together now.

NTFS-3G - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think I still have some external hard drives formatted with NTFS that I can read and write to. It the Mac HFS that I can only read.

Fat 32 or NTFS can be used on Linux, Mac and Windows. I'm not sure about ext2 or ext3, but I used that as my sole partition on my Linux laptop.