partitioning - External hard drive how to format it?

I just bought a hard drive of 500GB that I want to use on Mac OS X and GNU/Linux but be able to use some file on Windows.

Basically I have to deal with FAT32 (That doesn't support file over 4GB), NTFS without Mac OS writting support, HFS (Not working on Windows) and EXT3 (Not working on Mac OS X)

How should I do ? Having a NTFS partion, a HFS+ partition, a EXT3 partition and a FAT32 partition ?

Answer

You could go with an ext3 and mount it in Windows and Mac OS. I've used the Windows software before, worked fine, I can't personally vouch for ext2/3 on Mac OS, but it appears a valid solution.