Cross-OS filesystem on external USD Hard Disk

Last Friday I went to Low Yat Plaza to buy an external USB hard disk. What motivated me was the realization that for the past 1 year I have been only focusing on work in office, and not learning much of anything that is not company-specific. I intend to experiment with newer OS, as well as having an external store to for my laptop - most of the space is used up by Vista.

As with most external disk drives, all 320 GB of it is formatted in FAT32. Which works fine if one uses it to store files and perform back up. I wanted to have 3 separate partition:

1. First partition (25%) to install a Windows OS
2. Second partition (25%) to install a *NIX OS - say Linux or FreeBSD
3. 3rd Partition (50%) for storing files
   

Hence begun my journey to attempt to partition an external USB disk. First downloaded Knoppix, and used fdisk to create 3 partitions. I manage to create the 3 partitions, but Vista is unable to read the 2 newly created logical partitions. So I had to reformat it - which defaults to NTFS format. I thought it is simple enough to convert from NTFS back to FAT32 - I was wrong.


Next was using built in Windows utilities: Windows Vista's (Enterprise, SP1) Disk Management utility, which has rudimentary partition capabilities. Unfortuantely, it only allows 2 formats: NTFS and exFAT. I was looking for FAT32.

Then I tried the diskpart utility, which is bundled with Vista. Again, partitioning to NTFS works, but it will not allow me to partition to FAT32.

This is most probably due to Microsoft's push to newer file formats - NTFS and exFAT. I thought an older operating system will do the trick. I tried on Windows 2000 (Professional, SP4) using the "format" and "convert" utility. No such luck, it only a maximum size of 8 GB - probably using 512-Byte clusters and FAT16?

I was too fed up with all the wrangling and limitations of Windows tools. I will just live with NTFS, and when accessing the partitions from Linux will use the NTFS-3G driver to avoid corruptions during data writes.