I've taken a rather unconventional approach in building my desktop multi-boot system: I have a trayless mobile rack for HDDs, so I have one HDD with Linux, another with Windows, and another with Mac (I had a few spare drives laying around). When I want to change the OS, I slide in the appropriate HDD. No messing with partitions, boot loaders, etc.

My goal is to have a larger HDD that is permanently installed in the desktop and whose files can be accessed by all three OS disks. Is FAT32 the best solution?

I intend to have mainly audio/video files on the permanently installed disk, such as my iTunes library, in addition to documents such as text (doc), images, etc. I will probably stick mostly in the Mac environment (I also have a MBP), but I want to be able to experiment with the other OSs--and have access to the same files.

I have found various programs to go between the native file system formats (Windows=NTFS, Linux=ext3, Mac=HFS+), but that seems to be quite a bother and likely to have bugs. I haven't seen my situation directly addressed in the forums, here or elsewhere. Any suggestions on the best way to get these file systems to share the same drive?

TIA,
Dave

I think NTFS can be the best solution for all of them

icchansan: thanks for the quick reply. Makes sense, a friend with Win/Linux system concurs. Looks like NTFS-3G is the way to go for Mac-Win, except maybe I have to wait for a Snow Leopard 64-bit update to NTFS-3G, based on some comments I have seen. And I found some tips for read and write to Windows for my Debian-based Linux distro. Will give this arrangement a go.