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Ext3 <-> NTFS


Havin_it
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'ning,

 

Just came across this:

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd

 

Works for Ext3, too - though it only mounts partitions per-user, slightly annoying but still, great to have all that fileage opened up from the Windows side. My drive is all mine, wherever I boot! :banana:

 

Now, the earnest question: I'd like to hear from anyone who uses or has used either this, or the Captive NTFS R/W support on the Linux side. Was writing support reliable? Did everything survive reboot? Any quirks worth mentioning?

 

I ask this mainly because I'm possessed of one small-disk computer, two OSes, and a knowledge that I can't/won't be rid of either one, for various reasons. Storage needs are constantly fluctuating between the two, so I'd dearly love it if I didn't feel I'd need to repartition every time a big swing was needed.

 

Bring it on...

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can't manage partitions larger than 128G.

 

Not something that'll cause me enormous disappointment for the immediate future (try 30GB) :P

 

I can't see slow write-speeds breaking my heart either, the real issue is safety, which from what you say is getting to acceptable levels.

 

So, anyone else tried the Ext2/3 for Windows driver?

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I've been using the Total Commander (read-only) ext2/3 and ReiserFS plugin, which worked well. Unfortunately the last revision has issues with large files (it adds a few zeroed bytes at the end of the copied file, for no obvious reason, to me at least...) and so some types of files are unable to be copied properly.

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Meh, looks like I overlooked a wee detail. The Ext2fsd driver isn't supposed to write to Ext3 according to the docs. Mind you, the installer gives you the option to force this functionality. (I tend to avoid like the plague anything that mentions 'forcing' things - it don't seem right, you should have a consensual relationship with your computer!)

 

Another annoying thing is it doesn't want to mount automatically on boot. The service is running, but how to do an auto-mount I dunno. Tried putting it in the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run reg key, tried putting it in AUTOEXEC.BAT (does XP even read this?), no joy. Doesn't work from the Run dialog either, only from a terminal. AAAANNND, it seems only the user who mounted it can actually see the darn drive in Explorer. Worrying...!

 

How exactly do Ext2 and Ext3 differ anyhoo? I'm curious about this because there was another thread recently that mentioned you couldn't do shredding on Ext3-mounted files because of how the data was organised. Can anyone explain?

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Cheers iph - I must have been thinking along the same lines, as this is more or less what I did. Since the command apparently only works when run through the Command Interpreter, I put in the startup folder a shortcut containing the line

 

cmd /q /c "mount 0 3 x:"

 

which seems to have done the job.

 

The fact that it only mounts per-user is still bothering me though. If I open Explorer under a different account the X: drive simply isn't there.

 

There are all these other accounts in XP, like LOCALSYSTEM, DefaultUser, etc. Anyone know where I can get more info about these different accounts and their respective purposes?

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