NI had to make a decision. Creating an own partition: Our main goal was to support NTFS drives without converting them to FAT. If you buy one of the newer laptops with preinstalled Win2k/XP you will only have one big NTFS partition. Linux isn't capable of writing to NTFS volumes yet. So there is no way to write anything to the hard disc drive. Handling both cases differently is way too error prone. Choosing ext3 vs. FAT32 filing system, we decided against a FAT32 filesystem on the new partition mainly because Windows isn't very smart when assigning the drive letters to partitions. Example: Your computer as 2 hard disc drives (C:, D:) and 1 cd drive (E:). If you add a FAT32 partition to the first drive, it will show up with the letter D: thus moving the second drive and the cd drive a letter. This will break all applictions in Windows which are installed on the second drive or access the cd drive. To prevent that we choose a filesystem which doesn't show up under Windows.