Want to install FreeBSD - need advice on Writable filesystems?

[samankaya at netscape.net]

Hello all,

This is my first post and first time on a mailing list for a very long time :)

I am just about to switch my Debian Linux install over to a dual boot between Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) and FreeBSD 7.2.

Currently my setup is as follows:

hda1 - ext3 
hdb1 - ext3 Linux root /
hdb2 - ext3 Linux home /home

Because of the lack of space in my network and the fact that the master IDE drive is 250GB and the slave IDE drive is 160GB I wanted to wipe / on hdb1 and reformat to UFS2 and install FreeBSD.

However would I be able to then write to UFS of Solaris as I will reformat the master to UFS for SXCE. I read on a forum already that BSD cannot write to ext3 only ext2 and if it did write to ext3 it would be without the journal. So I am not sure if writing to ext3 from BSD is a good idea either? 

The plan though at least is to write to UFS so that I can I can just bounce my data back and forth, so when it comes down to reformatting the ext3 /home partition I won't loose any of my information!

I do not have a SAN or NAS system or even enough space in my servers for NFS transfer which is why I need to take these measures in the first place.....

I hope someone has a response for my dilemma - many thanks,

Kaya