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58 Comments
- frontporsche, on 01/18/2008, -2/+17I used to use "ext2fsd", which as I remember, worked pretty well.
...that was back when I ran both Windows and Linux systems, side by side, using each for what they did best. Now I consider Microsoft to be self serving and unethical and I avoid using their products as much as possible. - MrSelfDestruct, on 01/18/2008, -0/+13Anyone who can get his hands on your pc, can access your stuff. Dual boot or not.
- wolferz, on 01/18/2008, -2/+12... all companies are self serving... otherwise they wouldn't be companies... they would be charities...
unethical I can buy but calling a company self serving evokes the Robin Williams joke "in the dictionary under redundant it says 'see redundant'" - inactive, on 01/18/2008, -1/+10>After the installation, you can find your Linux partition(s) in the normal Windows Explorer
It's cool and it can be useful.
Now, are we really sure we want to grant any Windows trojan/virus/whatever easy access to our Linux partitions? - kirushik, on 01/18/2008, -0/+8I use Total Commander extension to browse my Linux drives.
I think it's much better than OS-native mounting, because I don't want to let Windows to rustle through my drives. - inactive, on 01/18/2008, -1/+7External Hard Drive requires OS dependent File system
- yodasama, on 01/18/2008, -0/+5Ironically I just did this for the first time last night (sometimes the timing of things on digg is scary). I ended up using ext2fsd, which is a opensource, currently maintained, installable driver which can read/write Ext2 (for anyone new to this Ext3 is Ext2 with journaling, so it works with Ext3). I originally found it through a citation from the Ext3 Wikipedia entry.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd
I'm only using it because some updates fubar'd my Feisty install (not sure if I should blame adept installer or the overly needy vmware that seemed to cause the the update to die) (it was a very large update since I hadn't turned that computer on in a while). I was planning to redo the partitioning anyways since Feisty had a bug regarding partitions over 200GB, so I thought it would be a waste of time to reinstall into the current partitions just to get my data out. Since pulling it all out with Knoppix wouldn't have been practical in this instance, I went with an Ext2 XP driver. Other than such a reason I probably wouldn't use one, considering the risks it poses to the Linux system (though some of those things, like screwing up permissions may only pertain to fs-driver. anyone know?).
So far this is actually quite a nice program. It is very light, it has a fairly painless installer and it looks a heck of a lot nicer than fs-driver's installer and configuration tools. I believe it gave me an option to mount devices for my current session or permanently (though it looks like it will let me unmount them easily). Access to my Ext3 partitions has been pretty fast and reliable so far for both reading and writing. Only bit of oddness so far is that programs like dvdshrink get confused by what the file system is and rather than making a large .iso it defaults to breaking the file up into 1GB files (.I00, .I01,..., .MDS), which turns out is a compatibility thing it does for FAT32 file systems. So, I'll chalk that up to the program being a bit confused by Ext3 and not an issue with the driver.
All in all, I'm rather impressed by this product. I would recommend researching it a bit first before using it on a production system or any Linux install you really care about. And I would further recommend that if you have Linux installed go use that rather than Windows. But still, it is very promising.
(Yes, I realize that I rambled a bit.) - inactive, on 01/18/2008, -0/+5Use caution (and duplicate backups) when using these tools to MODIFY your ext3 partitions. I've had more than one of mine destroyed by these various tools. That being said, they're quite reliable for read operations on ext2/3.
- HonoredMule, on 01/18/2008, -2/+7True, but most company succeed at being self-serving by offering some value to their actual customers. Microsoft just makes sure its really hard for people to NOT be customers, in ways that even shaft the people who are. They are the corporate equivalent to a serfdom, right down to the "can't survive leaving" part.
- kinghajj, on 01/18/2008, -1/+5What? We all don't run servers.
- robojiannis, on 01/18/2008, -2/+6Yeah, but that's a security risk. Your password protected data of linux can be accessed from windows without a password request.
So if you have dual boot computer, anyone who can get his hands on your pc, can access your stuff. Protected or not. - schweeet, on 01/18/2008, -2/+6No, but some of us use a simple network storage link, e.g. NSLU2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2), that does the trick.
- aiten, on 01/18/2008, -0/+4As with many Microsoft protocols, the API for extending filesystem support in Windows is a heap of undocumented crap. fs-driver works very well, but even they say themselves there was a lot of guesswork involved in writing the driver (which is no longer under active development) and so I cannot recommend using it as a long term solution.
Just do what I did, and use Linux full time! - MrSelfDestruct, on 01/18/2008, -1/+5No need. Both systems can write NTFS.
- Disfnord, on 01/18/2008, -0/+4People who read digg's Linux/Unix section?
- secrity, on 01/18/2008, -0/+3I would use Samba and share the directory or use CIFS and mount the share.
- commentbot, on 01/18/2008, -2/+5Another option is to use a common partition for archives, formated as NTFS. Readable by both Linux and Windows :)
- HonoredMule, on 01/18/2008, -0/+3It's not native enough that Windows can figure out how to mess up the partitions. All that dementia is safely cordoned off in MS-specific APIs or API extensions.
The native driver allows userspace-level file reading and writing, that's about it. Attempts to do do stupid ***** like indexing or writing NTFS metadata could possibly be getting attempted, but if it's not sane, the driver ignores it, keeping your data safe. I've used all three of the options listed, and I liked the native driver by far the best. Its a stupid hassle to have to have a special program just to see or write certain files, and hurts productivity.
The native driver seems the most performant and stable, too. - maximumsteve1, on 01/18/2008, -0/+3that joke is flawed. "in the dictionary under recursive it says 'see recursive'" would make sense. a synonym is redundant.... not the same word you're referencing.
- andycr512, on 01/18/2008, -0/+3Agreed. If you want actual security, use something like TrueCrypt. Relying on your OS to hide things for you without any encryption isn't secure at all.
- inactive, on 01/18/2008, -0/+3Fortunately for me, I ripped out my windows partition about a year ago and never looked back; back when i was still dual-booting, however, i did try some of these.
Ext2IFS worked pretty well, i remember some file corruption problems when trying to write to ext3, but fortunately only the file i modified was corrupted; that may be fixed by now. Another complaint was the licencing; it's not GPL.
Explore2FS was nice, open source (altough i'm not sure it was explicitly GPL; but the source is provided, which is good enough); but since it didn't provide access at the windows filesystem driver level (no saving to ext3 from a program, no native searching, etc.) using it became a bit of a pain. I ultimately preferred ext2ifs.
never used the diskinternals one. - zwaldowski, on 01/18/2008, -0/+3From some quick research, OS X uses HFS+. There's no ability to access those yet.
- BassJunkie, on 01/18/2008, -1/+3Both the above are valid suggestions, not sure why schestowitz got dugg down for suggesting an external HDD as that's a valid solution and much cheaper/easier then a NAS!
- BassJunkie, on 01/18/2008, -1/+3Why use FAT32 when Linux can access NTFS - you then also get around the FAT32 file size limitation then, useful if creating VM's, large video files or even DVD ISO's that are going to occupy more then 4Gb!
- JohnFlux, on 01/18/2008, -0/+2I use Explore2fs but I find it a bit unstable. Sometimes the computer freezes while reading files from the ext2 partition.
- liquidjamm, on 01/18/2008, -0/+2Yay! I can finally watch my pron without a reboot!
- yule, on 01/18/2008, -1/+3Same here, very good plugin for an extremely good tool.
http://www.totalcmd.net/plugring/ext2fsreiser.html - MrSelfDestruct, on 01/18/2008, -0/+2Let's not forget Vmware. Install Linux and you can mount your partition from there.
- renegadeafk, on 01/18/2008, -0/+2Why are they getting dugg down? And distro now can read/write ntfs fine and it is better than FAT32
- zwaldowski, on 01/18/2008, -0/+2Please explain. I'm about to install either Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE with Vista, and I want to be able to access both of my partitions.
- darkvad0r, on 01/18/2008, -0/+2not for free (unless by free you mean "can be downloaded from torrents" ;) ) but I use MacDrive and it works like a charm
- zwaldowski, on 01/19/2008, -0/+2Did you read the instructions on their site? You have to put the installer in XP Compatibility mode and then run it as administrator.
- andycr512, on 01/18/2008, -0/+2MWeather: FAT32 isn't an OS independent filesystem. It was designed, to my knowledge, for DOS and as such UNIX-style permissions get completely hosed when you use it for files with anything other than the simplest of permissions. Linux can read it, but it's not independent. I often format USB keys as EXT2 for Linux backup use.
- MWeather, on 01/18/2008, -0/+2Actually, everyone on Digg uses Linux. In fact, most people using most websites use Linux.
- robojiannis, on 01/18/2008, -1/+2you're right on that. but why make it easier? ;)
- inactive, on 01/18/2008, -0/+1I personally use the fs-driver.org one. It works great.
- ciper, on 01/18/2008, -0/+1I had Windows XP and Unbuntu installed, and used the Ext2 file system for windows to access the ubuntu partitions (had both /root and /home partitions mapped as drives in windows). After accessing those "drives" in windows, i would be unable to boot or to retreave any data from ubuntu. I tried that in two computers with the same symptoms. With fedora this didn't happen, i dunno if this somewhat related to the different versions of the ext3 filesystem in both OSs (fedora and ubuntu), or maybe a buggy Ext2 drivers for windows .. the thing is, i never tried it again because i didn't want to jeopardize the data in my linux partitions... and i was sick of reeinstalling ubuntu
- Rapax, on 01/18/2008, -0/+1Nice to have, thanks.
Does anyone know of a similar free tool that does this for OSX? I mean accessing the OSX files from the running Windows systems on a Mac with bootcamp? - a10webb, on 01/18/2008, -0/+1This was such a pain to do I didn't even bother before. Nice guide.
- ciper, on 01/18/2008, -1/+2I used to use Ext2 Installable File System for Windows but, my linux partitions started to die on me, after acessing them from windows...
- HonoredMule, on 01/18/2008, -1/+2Do you have problems with trojans writing files to drive L: and with a name and structure that isn't obviously out of place on a Linux system?
- inactive, on 01/18/2008, -0/+1Hmmm. Interesting, but I wouldn't want to access Linux from Windows, even though I dual boot. It would be like Ballmer shoving his gloved hand up Tux's ass - uncomfortable somehow... but if that's what you want and it works for you, fine :)
- TheWindBlows, on 01/19/2008, -0/+1Its mainly windows as windows design does a lot of fragmentation and unsafe mounting (it even screws up its own partitions badly.). Ubuntu's checks are kind of hard core and it likes everything to just be about perfect before attempting to mount.
If you plan you set up a Linux / Vista Dual Boot i suggest you use this techinque.
ext3 = this will contain GRUB (or w/e bootloader you use) and your linux distro
NTFS = VISTA
ext3 = home directory for linux. (make a directory link named 'home' on the main ext3 and aim it at this Partition)
( this is for changing distro's on the fly or upgrading easily with little or no worry of lost data.)
Logical -
-FAT32 = share. (yes linux can write to NTFS but windows might complain about it.)
(make a link pointing to it called windows-share on linux same if you want to for windows.)
-Linux Swap = obvious. (Its probably safe to use something so Vista can access the swap and use it) - YellowJacket018, on 01/18/2008, -0/+1Downloaded the first one talked about and I like it so far...
- inactive, on 01/18/2008, -0/+1Sweet. been Dual Booting Linux (Ubuntu) on my New Comp and runs nice, and now i won't need to boot into ubuntu to move something into my windows partition.
and anyone know if any of these would work across a network as well. (say for an embedded device running linux..)? - stoanhart, on 01/18/2008, -0/+1It's actually a 2 gig limit for Fat32. I found that out trying to store a Gzipped backup of my documents on my external hard drive (which if FAT32 for maximum compatibility). I will be converting it to NTFS soon now that there is write support through FUSE
- inactive, on 01/18/2008, -0/+1I've been using Ext2 for a while now with great luck! 'Tis also quite handy for force-mounting other partitions (fat16/32/ntfs) that Windows refuses to mount.
- logic, on 01/19/2008, -0/+1The read+write option doesn't seem to work on Vista, fyi. I know, I just tried :'(
- TheWindBlows, on 01/19/2008, -0/+1its the same either way...
- zwaldowski, on 01/19/2008, -0/+1Hmm... Alright, it seems a bit long for some interoperability. Besides, the only place I want to access from Vista is my home directory. I don't think a FAT32 partition would work out for me... I like virtual machines and have 4 GB of music+videos.
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