Are there ANY decent EXT3 read/write utils for XP?

The one I'm using is just about working but I would like to be able to
"install" the filesystem and just be able to drag and drop, if possible?

Any recommendations?

Thanks
Jon

The message <>
from Jon <> contains these words:

> The one I'm using is just about working but I would like to be able to
> "install" the filesystem and just be able to drag and drop, if possible?

> Any recommendations?

> Thanks
> Jon

You could try this one:

<http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html>

It allows win2k and winXP to read and write to EXT2/3 partitions.
However, as far as writes go, it simply treats it as an EXT2 partition,
i.e no journalling, so this might not suit your needs if you really
really must have journalled write support.

As far as win2k is concerned the IFS applet in the control panel is
totally redundent but is essential on a winXP system.

I've been using EXT2 formatted external drives for a few years now with
all my external USB drives that I connect to my win2k box. The lack of
journalled support is no big deal since the half hour or less FSCK time
to repair USB induced FS errors (thankfully, now a rare occurrence) is a
vast improvement over the 70 dollar trialware "use a sledgehammer to
crack a nut" type of NTFS repair tool which (the _only_ utility I could
find to deal with the problem), on a nearly full 320GB drive, took 7
hours just to analyse the file structure and show me a (seemingly
complete) list of files ready to be restored if I was prepared to
register it _and_ invest in another drive to copy them to (probably
another 4 or 5 hours copying time!).

From my PoV, the lack of journalling is no biggie and EXT2 is perfectly
ok for my needs. At least I have access to FSCK which, unlike MS's
rather feeble chkdsk utility, is quite capable of _fixing_ the USB
induced FS errors, a feature that seems to be absent from any of the
NTFS 'repair' utilities which all seemed to assume that they're dealing
with a failing disk that needs the data to be recovered to another drive
and fail to offer a FS repair option of any kind.

HTH

--
Regards, John.

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Johnny B Good <>
wibbled on Monday 01 February 2010 01:48


> I've been using EXT2 formatted external drives for a few years now with
> all my external USB drives that I connect to my win2k box. The lack of
> journalled support is no big deal

With Flash storage, it was the right decision. As nice as journals are, they
cause excessive wear on limited write devices.

--
Tim Watts

Managers, politicians and environmentalists: Nature's carbon buffer.

The message <hk5v6a$tfg$>
from Tim Watts <> contains these words:

> Johnny B Good <>
> wibbled on Monday 01 February 2010 01:48


> > I've been using EXT2 formatted external drives for a few years now with
> > all my external USB drives that I connect to my win2k box. The lack of
> > journalled support is no big deal

> With Flash storage, it was the right decision. As nice as journals
> are, they
> cause excessive wear on limited write devices.

Undoubtedly a better choice for flash media but, as it happens, I'm
using real hard disks in USB/Firewire or USB/eSATA enclosures so the
wear issue doesn't come into it.

The real benefit is that I'm using a FS for which I do have an
effective (and free) method to repair USB induced FS errors that
typically render the partition invisible to win2k. When this happens to
an NTFS partition, the microsoft check disk utility refuses to deal with
the problem since it can only see a blank unformatted disk.

Despite extensive googling for a solution to this conundrum at the
time, I couldn't find anything to repair the FS errors, just freebies
that were designed to _recover_ certain types of file to other media on
the basis that the problem was due to a failing disk rather than simply
due to FS errors that simply required a more trivial solution.

The best of this bunch, which was designed to recover all files
regardless of type, was a "Ransomware" product that _still_ made the
rather arrogant assumption that the media it was recovering the files
from was failing and the cause of the problem rather than a victim of
USB flakiness and provided no FS repair option whatsoever.

With EXT2, I can either reboot into a Knoppix Live CD session or
connect the drive to another PC running Linux and repair the USB induced
FS corruption with FSCK, usually a 20 to 30 minute operation rather than
some 11 to 12 hours or more using a registered Ransomware utility plus a
duplicate disk drive.

There may well be more suitable NTFS repair tools, capable of working
with external USB connected drives now, but if there are any such, I'm
afraid they've rather "Missed The Boat"(tm). As it happens, the three
external USB 1TB drives were originally formatted as EXT2 for use in my
FreeNAS server box so it's more convenient to leave them formatted as
EXT2 anyway.

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.