EXT2 on Windows - a Year later

[ Thanks to mcasperson for this link. ]

"I recently found myself in the not too uncommon situation of needing to access files from both Windows and Linux in a dual boot setup. Traditionally the solution is a common partition formatted with FAT32, but instead of making Linux do the hard work of interacting with Windows, I thought I would try it the other way around. This is how I found myself testing both Ext2Fsd and Ext IFS For Windows.

"Both open source projects provide an EXT2 driver (and EXT3, which is backwards compatible with EXT2) for Windows, allowing you to access files from both Linux and Windows using one of Linux's native file systems.

"First up I tried Ext2Fsd, and it was a disaster. After a few hours of operation Windows applications would start to lock up in such a way that they could not be killed using task manager. In fact I tried a number of tools to kill the processes, including Process Explorer and the taskkill command line tool. Despite my best efforts I could not find a utility that could kill the processes that had locked up while using Ext2Fsd. If I left my PC running overnight (with nothing but a small selection of background applications running) Windows would be locked up by the morning. The mouse would move, but I could not run any applications or shut the machine down. The only solution left was a hard reset."

Complete Story

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