Re: Writing to ext3 fs from XP

James Wilkinson ha scritto:

Hadders wrote:

If found this driver, http://www.fs-driver.org/ . Sound goods, but only
has ext2 support.

Jonathan Berry replied:

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.

Hadders responded:

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.

We are talking Windows here. In my experience, Windows 2000 and XP can
be pretty stable, but it does depend on the quality of the drivers --
there are a lot of very badly written drivers our there. It's arguable
that Linux's biggest stability advantage is that most drivers have to go
through the Quality Assurance process of the Linux Kernel Mailing List
(and most user-space drivers don't get to affect the stability of the
system). [1]

So it will only take one dodgy driver (especially if you've got a
dual-core or hyperthreading system [2]) to challenge the stability of
your system.

You may find that a large FAT32 partition is best for your needs.
(Windows won't create them above 32 GB, but it will read larger
partitions.)

Hope this helps,

and what about this:

http://www.crossmeta.com/ ,