Sharing partitions with Windows - Ext2 :)

Neuro · 2005-12-17 12:04:07

I've been happily using a configuration of WinXP (mostly for games ) + Arch for quite some time.

I have a 120gb SATA drive split NTFS, FAT, reiserfs, swap partitions.

I used that FAT partition as my media storage space. Movies, music, ebooks etc went there. It worked fine for me, but up to a point.

You see in my Music folder I had 111 artists (the folder was over 25gb). The listing of the directory was painfully slow (despite having a 7200rpm drive on SATA full speed). As I knew FAT was quite an old FS (it was a godly one but that was quite some time ago ) I decided to move onto something else.

But then again, NTFS was out of question due to no write support udner Linux. So... I turned to ext3 Yup... with filetypes,dir_index,sparse_super. I've put all the data (60gb) somewhere else and gave it a go.

Now indexing of the Music folder is fast (just as listing any other directory). But the problem was: How can I read/write ext2/3 under Windows.

I digged the internet for a while and found a solution http://www.fs-driver.org/. It worked wonders for me.

So if you need to share some space between Windows and Linux give Ext2 IFS a go.

Hope that helps someone.

stavrosg · 2005-12-17 12:10:57

You could check ntfs-fuse driver, too.
Apparently, fs-driver doesn't like utf8 filenames

Neuro · 2005-12-17 14:29:05

*
Resize files. (the kernel driver can resize only small files, and extension of large ones is comeing along soon).
*
Create files. (50% chance for it to work at the moment. Up to 10 files in a newly created directory)
*
Create directories. (50% chance for it to work too)
*
Remove files/directories (works most of the time)

Although I do know about the ntfs-fuse module, it's too limited at this time.

As for utf8... I'm not sure if FAT32 supports it either

There are also other ext2/3 drivers for Windows:
http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/ - has read/write in latest versions
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm - read only

stavrosg · 2005-12-17 15:42:19

uhm...

iocharset=value
Character set to use for converting between 8 bit characters and
16 bit Unicode characters. The default is iso8859-1. Long file-
names are stored on disk in Unicode format.

from the mount manpage ;-)
The problem is that this driver uses the active codepage to read the files atm.

As for the ntfs-fuse, I haven't tried it yet, either, since I don't have the need for it. But I think that for single partition nfts volumes should work fine as is* , and it will (probably) improve over time

* except for the 10 files/new dir thingy

Arch Linux

#1 2005-12-17 12:04:07

Sharing partitions with Windows - Ext2 :)

#2 2005-12-17 12:10:57

Re: Sharing partitions with Windows - Ext2 :)

#3 2005-12-17 14:29:05

Re: Sharing partitions with Windows - Ext2 :)

#4 2005-12-17 15:42:19

Re: Sharing partitions with Windows - Ext2 :)

Board footer