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> Probably never, because those contain the GPL virus,

Windows has supported installable filesystems for well over a decade.
If this guy could do it with GPL code, microsoft could too.

Thank You, I was (obviously) not aware that's what was done on EXT2. Is that also done with any of the other Linux filesystems?

I believe so. In fact, the article doesn't explicitly state that's what ext2 does specifically, and I'm not very intimate with the file system myself to know for sure, but I'm pretty sure that all reasonably developed Linux filesystems would do the same. I'd recommend ext2 regardless, as it seems to have the most developer mindshare and install base. Maybe you could ask more in a UNIX IRC channel or forum to learn more about what specific filesystems do.

If you're interested, there's also a number of solutions for reading ext2 from Windows. Here are two system modules that you can install for read/write access:
http://www.ext2fsd.com/?page_id=2
http://www.fs-driver.org/ - I've used this one briefly and it worked well.

Additionally, there are userspace applications for reading it, but they are a bit slower as they operate in userspace.

Hope this helps you

Look at what cert this driver was signed with:
http://www.ext2fsd.com/

I have ~6TB on external USB drives and I've been doing this for a few years now. I have a few words of caution about NTFS. If you get an USB drive that for example spins down or if you turn your USB drive off without properly dismounting it (or if Windows crashes), you might see this line:

Delayed write failed!

And on two occasions that meant that Windows fucked up the file allocation table or whatever it's called under NTFS and I lost the _entire_ disk.

Windows loves getting its fingers into that table whenever you mount a USB filesystem. It's not like it tries to keep its write cache empty. Nooo.. every file access needs to be continuously recorded in that thing.

Anyway, be careful when you use NTFS on a USB drive. Alternatively use EXT3, which you can still mount under Windows using:

http://www.ext2fsd.com/

(Note that these experiences are under Windows XP, I have no clue if Vista or 7 does any better, I assume not.)

Though it blue-screened almost constantly when I started using it, ext2fsd is pretty stable, these days.

I just format my external disks as ext3, reserving a small partition (maybe 2-3GB out of 1TB) as a FAT32 partition.

Throw the installers for Ext2FSD, an "Open source ext2/ext3 file system driver for Windows (NT/2K/XP/VISTA, X86/AMD64)" on the FAT32 partition. This allows you to bootstrap any Windows machines you come across to access the EXT partition(s).

There are some instructions for ext3 access on OSX on various sites online, but I haven't tried any out myself.

It seems like the best solution would be to have external drive enclosures be able to act like disks or like little servers. If you want them to just be a disk, then they can have direct access, but if you're trying to access an ext3 disk on a Vista or OSX machine that doesn't have support for that file system, the hardware could just run a little ftp or sftp server and the host machine could just access it over ip.

Windows ext2/ext3 driver: ext2fsd

Works great on XP. No Windows 7 or ext4 support yet.

I prefer Ext2FSD myself, but neither is ideal. They require a helper application that doesn't autostart (there's a non-working option for it), and they can be fickle about mounting (e.g. click mount and it doesn't happen, or open the drive and Windows asks to format it). I've had data loss with NTFS-3g (hopefully that bug's been squashed), and exFAT isn't supported in Linux.

IMHO filesystem compatibility is a great example of how Linux devs are bad at leaving boring, but critical applications half done. E.g. they work, but have you have to jump through hoops and even then there are major bugs and little to no polish. Ideally, you could use any Windows or Linux filesystem in the other OS transparently with all features, to the point that the common user doesn't need to know what filesystems their partitions use.

All that said, I use FAT32 or Ext2 for shared partitions for lack of a better alternative.

As a long-time user of Linux who is currently using Microsoft Windows XP, the whole vfat (FAT with Win95 long file names) patent and how Microsoft has handled this patent makes me feel that maybe Microsoft is engaging in the same kind of monopolistic behavior that they engaged in when they destroyed Netscape in the 1990s.

I'm sure people know about Microsoft's patent violation lawsuit against TomTom; if you don't the Wikipedia is your friend. What a lot of people don't know is that Microsoft made some changes to Vista so that you can no longer easily use an unpatented filesystem like ext2 (Linux's 1990s file system which nicely enough is supported in Windows with a couple of different 3rd party drivers).

For me, it seems very suspicious that Microsoft made some changes to Vista that make it very difficult to use filesystems not patented by Microsoft around the same time they used licenses for their filesystems as a revenue source.

I posted a blog about this back in March and to quote that blog entry:

it can be shown, with Vista, that Microsoft removed compatibility for non-patented filesystems, forcing people to license Microsoft's patents, not because the patents are novel, but because the patented filesystems must be used for interoperability purposes

I use Windows right now instead of Linux because I don't feel Linux is ready for the desktop, but most of my partitions for "extra data" are formatted using the second extended filesystem (Linux's "base" stand file system) and read in Windows using ext2fsd because I don't want my data to be held hostage by Microsoft patents.

So, yes, I really want Linux to succeed.

Storing your most of your "extra data" in ext2? Wow, you're really sticking it to the man, aren't you?

(BTW thanks for spelling out what ext2 was for the rest of us, we may not have figured that one out...)

my partitions for "extra data" are formatted using the second extended filesystem (Linux's "base" stand file system) and read in Windows using ext2fsd because I don't want my data to be held hostage by Microsoft patents.

Your problems are bigger than just Microsoft, and they will only be solved with the proper counseling and medication. Illogical paranoia of that level is only going to lead you further down a path of harm to yourself and those who care for you.

You know, as much as I agree with you, I wish it were not so.

More and more things are getting tied to a computer. Back in the early 1990s, a computer was generally used for number crunching and document managing. People (generally) did not use a computer to listen to music, watch a movie, meet people, or to stay in touch with one's friends.

Now people are using computers for all of these functions. It's important that things we need for daily living in the 21st century are not controlled by a single corporation with a known pattern of abusive behavior. Microsoft's latest abusive behavior--suing TomTom for having FAT32 support on their device--shows that the only thing stopping Microsoft from abusing their monopoly are antitrust laws and community activism.

This is why Linux needs to fix the issues that make Linux not a suitable desktop for end users, or why one of the other possible open-source desktop OSes (Haiku, Syllable, etc.) needs to become a suitable end-user desktop.

I use Windows right now instead of Linux because I don't feel Linux is ready for the desktop, but most of my partitions for "extra data" are formatted using the second extended filesystem (Linux's "base" stand file system) and read in Windows using ext2fsd because I don't want my data to be held hostage by Microsoft patents.

So, yes, I really want Linux to succeed.

- Sam

I think a closed-source freeware driver has less chance to be ported to Mac than this:
http://www.ext2fsd.com/projects/projects.htm