Jonathan Berry wrote:
On 12/4/06, Hadders <fedora@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,
Just wondering if anybody has had any experience of writing to an ext3
partition within windows.
If found this driver, http://www.fs-driver.org/ . Sound goods, but only
has ext2 support.
Does anybody know of anything similar for ext3?
ext3 is completely backwards compatible with ext2. Thus, you can
mount an ext3 partition as an ext2 one, you just won't get the added
benefits of ext3 (like journaling). I have used a Windows ext2 driver
in the past and it worked fairly well. I stopped using it, though,
because one day I had to pull the power when in Windows and the next
time I booted Linux, the ext3 filesystems had error and had to be
fixed (which wasn't as easy without the journal). That scared me :-).
For what you want to do, NTFS may be a good solution. As others have
noted, the new ntfs-3g driver for Linux seems to work fairly well.
Jonathan
Hmmm, so what you're saying is the driver works fine unless you drop the
power to the box. That's not a problem for me, I have a UPS and I can't
remember the last time I had to hold in the ATX switch for 10 seconds to
force a cut-out. Also, I'll be running the partition on a RAID 1
mirror, that may fix an odd half-write inconsistency from the other
disk, .. maybe, depends which it believes is the correct disk.
But the ntfs-3g driver works "fairly well"...
Sounds like either way I run the risk of something going wrong, at some
point.
I think I'll hedge my beats and split the disk into an NTFS and ext3
partition, one for each OS for backup. After all, at 60GB each, I will
have a fair amount of room for backups and really, if I had 120GB, I'd
just get lazy and fill it up eventually.
