just doing some reading this morning and noticed that someone had stated that linux can not write to an ntfs partion. ( iwas unaware of this. glad i have not tried doing yet!) i take it it does not matter if the windows partion is on a completly seperate drive! i am currently pondering the thought of formating and reinstalling my winxp ( having problems with my burner and to get a new one from dell this is one of there "troubleshooting" techniques don't know what the hell it is gonna do to fix my cd burner but if it gets me a new one then hey!!) would it be benificil to format in fat32 rather then NTFS if i want the ability to write to my windows from RH? or is the comment that linux can not write to an NTFS partion false?

thanks for any replies!

Well, "seeing" an NTFS partition and "writing" to it are 2 different things. You can view data on an NTFS partition with Linux, but writing to it isn't available, yet. If you really need to write to the Windows partition, then formatting in FAT32 is the way to go. If you just want to be able to access the data, and possibly copy it to your Linux partition, you can do that with NTFS, though.