#  Introduction 

The best way to share a partition with Linux is to create an EXT2 filesystem and use revision 0 (aka GOOD_OLD_REV) as the filesystem format. By using the GOOD_OLD_REV (revision 0) format you can avoid the _dir_index_ and _large_file_ issues encountered with DYNAMIC_REV (revision 1). 
  
#  Example 

Here is an example of how you can create, format and check an EXT2 filesystem using the Linux native tools: 
    
    # mkfs -t ext2 -r 0 /dev/hda3
    # fsck -C -t ext2 /dev/hda3
    # tune2fs -c 20 -i 6m -L Share /dev/hda3
    # fsck -C -t ext2 /dev/hda3
    # tune2fs -l /dev/hda3
    

  
If you want to use the revision 1 ext2 fs format it is possible but you need to format it like this: 
    
    # mke2fs -I 128 -L "Choose a name here" -O ^dir_index,^has_journal -v /dev/partition
    

(you can get mke2fs from the e2fsprogs package). 

Partitions formatted this way are compatible with the windows and OS X ext2 drivers: 

<http://www.fs-driver.org/>
<http://ext2fsx.sourceforge.net/>