Best way to setup drive partitions for hosting music and shared media?

[jd@smokin-barrel.com]

Hi all,
I am planning on building a new home pc which will serve as the music/media server for the house. It will be ubuntu, but will also have windows xp running in VMWare. I would like to setup a large partition dedicated to media and music, but since we will be ripping hundreds of cd's into flac, I dont want to lose this data or store it more places than 1. So I want to setup the drive so that it can easily be used by different OS's and still be in tact if i somehow destroy the original ubuntu install.

What is the best way to do this? I have never messed with linux partitions, except for messing with it during install. Should i just install the OS, then do the partition after the fact? If so, how? NTFS?

Thanks,
JD

[jd@smokin-barrel.com]

I was wondering if I needed to include more info as I got no replies? Please advise.

Thanks,
JD

[RainCT]

If you will mainly use GNU/Linux on that system, I'd say go for ext2/ext3; there is a program which adds support for them to Windows, so there shouldn't really be a problem if later you have to access it from The Other System.