How do I read a fedora partition from windows? [closed]

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.

Answer 1

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 ;)

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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

• What Windows ext3 driver should I use?

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.