Question

Windows recognizes and gives my fedora partition a drive letter, but it shows it as blank. Is there a way to get windows to read ext3 filesystem? Its a Fedora 10 partition.

Was it helpful?

Solution

I'd take a look at EXT2 IFS for Windows.

Several things to keep in mind with this.

  • Ext3 is backwards compatible with Ext2, it just doesn't write to the journal
  • NTFS is case insensitive, this may screw with you depending on what you are moving
  • Some filenames that are valid in Ext2/3 are invalid in NTFS/VFAT like : and $
  • Special files will be inaccessible, sockets, soft links, block devices
  • permissions are not maintained
  • Will not work with LVM volumes

It will let you read and write to it though ;)

OTHER TIPS

I know that you want to mount your Fedora partition but from experience I have found that the best way to share a partition with Windows is to format as NTFS and use ntfs-3g to access it in Linux.

I tried using the ext2 Windows app mentioned by JensenDied a couple of years ago and ended up having problems accessing data on the USB drive that it was being used with.

See the answers to my similar question on ServerFault.com:

Summary of the best answer I got (and other answers were later deleted, I assume by their authors): Use ntfs-3g to access the NTFS filesystem from Linux. You will have a much smaller chance of filesystem corruption doing it this way than using any of the existing ext2/3 drivers from Windows.

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