ext2 on Windows

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sprucio · #1 Post by **sprucio** » 2005-10-07 20:18

Does anyone know if there is a stable driver that will allow Windows XP to read/write to an ext2 fs?

startx · #2 Post by **startx** » 2005-10-07 21:34

there is a programm called explore2fs, but it only has read support.
this a a quite stable program.
(however this is actually not bad if you dont want viruses from win destroying linux partitions.)
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

i think if you really want a stable data exchange beetween the partitions you should use one vfat partition.

i know of one driver for win
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm

but i never tested it so i cant tell you how stable this is.

sprucio · #3 Post by **sprucio** » 2005-10-07 22:16

Thanks for the help.

Currently, I have thre vfat partitions since vfat has a limitation of 40GB (give or take). Because I find it annoying to have multiple partitions, I really don't like this but I suppose this is the only thing that'll be sufficient for what I do since M$ won't allow any other FS drivers to work on their OS.

xequence · #4 Post by **xequence** » 2005-10-23 03:16

sprucio wrote:Thanks for the help.

Currently, I have thre vfat partitions since vfat has a limitation of 40GB (give or take). Because I find it annoying to have multiple partitions, I really don't like this but I suppose this is the only thing that'll be sufficient for what I do since M$ won't allow any other FS drivers to work on their OS.

I think some programs can make fat32 partitions over 32 GB... I heard that the debian/ubuntu installer cant, while the mandriva one can. (Diskdrake I think its called)

sprucio · #5 Post by **sprucio** » 2005-11-05 14:11

Would that work in Windows?

I need a file system that has a large size (50GB or more) that both Windows and Linux can read/write.

J Arcane · #6 Post by **J Arcane** » 2005-12-10 20:46

Mainly, I just have an 80 GB vfat partition stuck square in the middle of my drive. I keep all my music and such there, so I can access from both. I used Windows to do all my drive partitioning, 10GB for Windows system, 80 GB for shared data, and then partitioned another 20GB as FAT as a placeholder for Debian, which then got overwritten when I installed it.

Explore2fs is handy though.

Arnvidr · #7 Post by **Arnvidr** » 2005-12-12 16:48

You can make fat32 partitions much larger than 32 GB, but Windows can't read bigger partitions without some kind of trickery. Search around for a fix perhaps

Jason W · #8 Post by **Jason W** » 2006-04-15 12:30

I have found that using an ext2 partition is the best way for me to share data between Linux and Windows. Most my computers exclusively run Linux. But I share one machine with my son which is a Windows 2k box that I may boot into Knoppix every few days. So most files downloaded and saved to that partition are done with Windows. But when I use Knoppix, I want to have Linux file permissions so I save and run programs, scripts and such. And when I set up a dual boot, I would like the shared partition to be my /home directory. Fat32 works well, of course, for data storage but I would prefer using a native Linux filesystem.

Here is a couple of read/write ext2 Windows drivers:

http://www.fs-driver.org/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd

I have used both of these for a couple of days, and I haven't found any problem so far in normal use. My biggest concern was that the ext2 partition would be -through Windows- mounted, wrote to, and then unmounted leaving it in a clean state. So far when I run e2fsck on the partition after using it in Windows it reports it as clean. Seems to work for me.