On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:45:49 Rodney Baker wrote:
[...]
I know there are plenty of file systems on linux -- but virtually none of them are ported to Win32, and I can't see NTFS becoming a defacto-industry standard as long as MS sits on it as proprietary.
There is a stable ext3 installable file system (IFS) driver which allows you to mount ext3 partitions natively on XP. I have that on my laptop as well to provide two-way data access (i.e. access Linux partitions from XP with ext3.ifs and XP data from Linux with ntfs-3tg). It also provides write access and appears to be safe; I've mainly used it for read access to the Linux partitions but on the occasions that I've had to write from XP to Linux it hasn't caused any problem. YMMV.
I should also say that ext2.ifs (I incorrectly called it ext3.ifs above but it does not support journalling) could be a security risk in a secure environment as it does not preserve permissions as set on the ext 2/3 file system - if a driver letter is created for a Linux partition in Windows, all local Windows users have read/write access to that drive. In other words, your Linux root partition can become globally readable/writeable for Windows users (you can figure out the implications of that). Therefore I only use it on systems that only I have access to and I don't map the / partition to a drive letter on Windows (unless absolutely necessary, which is almost never...). -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au =================================================== Flappity, floppity, flip The mouse on the m"obius strip; The strip revolved, The mouse dissolved In a chronodimensional skip.