On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 12:39:33 -0500, Greg Freemyer
wrote: On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 18:28:37 +0100, Catimimi
wrote: Greg Freemyer a écrit :
I have the same task as you this morning, getting a ext2 FS to be usable from windows. In my case I need full functionallity. ie. I need 250GB partitiona support, a drive letter assigned, then I need to be able to use normal windows software.
I found ext2fsd (like you did?), but the "alpha" quality rating is pushing me away. The good news is that a release was made in the last couple of weeks, but it looks like a pretty significant bug that was just fixed.
bug fixes are listed at http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/projects/projects.htm#ext2fsd
There is also ext2ifs which considers itself beta software under Win2K, but is read-only
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm
I also found a commercial product for $30 which one hopes is
http://www.ext2fs-anywhere.com/index.htm
It appears to be from a German software company (Paragon Software
Group).
Does anyone have anything good or bad to say about Paragon?
Thanks Greg
I use ext2fs-anywhere in order to read and write to ext2 or ext3 partitions. It is OK with small (a few GB) partitions, but I got difficulties with 250GB partition so that I came back to NTFS. I write to NTFS under linux by using vmware and mounting a smbfs share. It works fine but it is rather expensive even with an education
On Monday, November 22, 2004 @ 12:45 PM, Greg Freemeyer wrote -- production quality. license.
Writing to ext2fs with Paragon give you up to 60% of non contiguous files and you get warnings with the trash under windows XP but it works.
Michel.
Based on the above, I'll give the ext2fsd driver a try.
I also just saw the ext2 tools for cygwin were released this summer. They could prove usefull as well.
http://www.mail-archive.com/cygwin-announce@cygwin.com/msg00897.html
Greg -- Greg Freemyer
ext2fsd did not work for me. I found sufficient docs to get the driver installed as a service. I did not find any need for a mount command, it all seemed pretty automatic.
One small issue is that by default you have to enter "net start ext2fsd" after every reboot, but I assume you can set that up permanently via the windows services program.
Once ext2fsd was running I could copy files off of the ext2 FS to a native windows FS.
I was not able to actually use the files directly on ext2. ie. The file open dialog box for my main application would not even let me select files on the ext2 partition.
Fortunately for me my files are static, but now I am having to put 2x250GB to tape, then restore them to a FAT32 partition. (I don't have a spare 250 GB drive to go direct disk-to-disk :(
I'm doing the first restore now. If I'm really lucky I will be able to start the second one before I leave work tonight.
FYI: I had to make my 250 GB fat partition in SUSE 9.2. Win2K and partition magic both refused to format something that big FAT. I considered NTFS, but Linux can't write to NTFS, so that was no good.
Greg -- Greg Freemyer
Greg Sorry ext2fsd didn't work for you. Based on the .22b release notes on their web site, looks like this software is still very much a work in progress. I went back through the thread for this topic and here's a quick summary of software based on what I got going out to the various web sites. *) Ext2ifs -- Says "If you have a PC which can dual boot...", meaning, I guess, if you have a machine with a dual Windows-Linux installation on it. It also says "What EXT2IFS can't do ... use removable media". I need to use this for a USB mounted hard drive, so not sure if it will work. *) e2fsprogs -- Looks like this is software for a Linux machine and not for Windows. *) ext2fsd -- Looks like they're still shaking out lots of bugs. *) ext2fs anywhere -- Michael had problems with it on large files, but looks like it still might have a chance of working for me. Based on your experience with ext2fsd, I've about decided to plunk down the $29.95 for Ext2FS Anywhere and just see what it will do. I was going to try the demo first, but then I saw this on the demo download page -- "Demo Restrictions: Read only drive Mounting of partition less than 1Gb" Right off the bat, I know that won't work, since my backups are app 6G. Oh well, at $29.95, it's really not too big a gamble. I'll let you know how it works for me. Greg W