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This is a good step forward, but when is Windows going to have native support for ext2 or ext3 filesystems? They've only been around for about 20 years now.

http://www.fs-driver.org/

Try opening a Linux file system with any version of Windows.

My linux file systems are on my linux machines which I access over the network, works fine. There are also drivers for accessing ext file systems on Windows if you want to plug the drive in directly.

How about this one, write a document in MS Office, save it in an open format such as .odt.

Why? Just send it as a word doc or a pdf or upload it to gdocs.

I can read Windows file systems, write to a .doc file, even install some Windows applications on my Linux box. If you prefer Windows, good for you. On this one though, your facts are backwards.

I can read Linux file systems, write to .odt (if for some reason i wanted to, using LibreOffice) on my Windows box so my facts are perfectly valid, you are just uneducated on the subject.

Microsoft has consistently refused to support ext(n) in any version of windows. (ext2/3 support is available from third parties, but Microsoft forces you to turn off driver signing in order to use it, and they refuse to allow third party ext drivers to be signed. )

Bullshit. In fact, the very link that you provided states in the feature list: "Includes drivers with a digital signature for Windows Vista x64"

Wait, wait.. so according to you Microsoft refuses to allow ext* drivers to be signed, and as evidence you link to a signed ext* driver?

That's ... um ... some serious denial of reality.

The $2B is composed of a few cents for each android (and IOS) device sold, from every DEVICE maker, (including Apple, which is largely BSD based). It is not because they use Android, it is because the MicroSD cards use Fat32, exFat, and the usb protocol increasingly uses Media Transfer Protocol (MTP), which is also patented by Microsoft.

Android itself does not include exFat/Fat32/MTP (Although the reference distribution of Android has hooks for these to be installed if the manufacturer wants, as does every Linux distribution.)

Google doesn't pay for this at all, because it is the device manufacturers that pay a secret amount to include these features. People want a easy way to move a mountain of music onto and off of their phones, and most of them only understand getting out a cable and plugging into a USB port.

Of course they could release the phones with ext3 or just about any other free file system, but then they would have to release drivers for all versions of windows. Microsoft has consistently refused to support ext(n) in any version of windows. (ext2/3 support is available from third parties, but Microsoft forces you to turn off driver signing in order to use it, and they refuse to allow third party ext drivers to be signed. )

One of these days Google will buy incorporate it into Android, and disabuse people that you need to plug your Android into any PC just to move media.

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

Why can not Google make a Ext driver for Windows and allow Windows install it automatically when attaching it?

Say a microSD card is formatted Ext, and the user removes the card from the phone and inserts it into a PC running Windows. The PC will see the Ext format and "helpfully" recommend that the user erase all the data and format it to FAT. I see no way for the card to interrupt that process and instead redirect the user to the web site where the Ext driver is available for download.

Google could offer MicroSD unformatted and tell to user to plug it in Windows PC and format it.

Say the user has formatted a microSD card to FAT using a Windows PC. The device would still need support for the FAT format just to be able to read and write files on this card.

They could provide a new IFS driver for Windows and make users install it to access it

Requiring installation of Ext2 IFS would make it more difficult for people who aren't an administrator to access their data. In addition, users would run the risk of accidentally accepting the offer by Windows to "helpfully" erase everything on an Ext2-formatted card by reformatting it to FAT32 or ExFAT.

Adding an SD Card slot and not being able to use the term "SD Card" is not very compelling to the manufacturer. Maybe they can say, we support black rectangular external memory expansion used on many devices

Which is why a lot of Chinese devices appear to claim a "TF slot", where TF stands for TransFlash, the preproduction name of microSD. Or if they want to have a full-size SD slot, they could call it a MultiMediaCard (MMC) slot that just happens to be wide enough to take SD cards.

Windows can mount and understand Linux filesystems now?

sort of...

MS does nothing to stop you from implementing any file system you like in Windows. In fact, they've got documentation on how to do it. It's called the Installable Filesystem Kit, which is part of their driver development kit. You can easily write your own file system drivers for Windows.

As an example have a look at http://www.fs-driver.org/. They've got an ext2 driver for Windows. Install it, and ext2 is a file system Windows understands and works with, just like any other. There are others too, there is a commercial HFS (Mac) IFS if you need it.

The problem is not that MS won't allow people to implement other file systems on Windows, they allow it easily. The problem is people are not at all interested in doing so. MS themselves are not that interested because they have a good file system. If you read the info on BTRFS it's goals read like an NTFS feature list. NTFS does what tehy want for a modern filesystem for their computers. For simpler devices, there is exFAT and FAT32. They need nothing else.

Also FAT is so widely supported because it is old (lots of things support it, so more things continue to support it, etc, positive feed back) and simple. For embedded devices, simplicity of a file system can be very important. You do not want the overhead associated with more complex file systems. As a simple example the exfat.sys driver in Windows 7, which supports all FAT systems (including 32, 16, and 12) is 200k. The ntfs.sys driver that supports NTFS is 1.6MB. Now please note that the size difference isn't the issue, it is just indicative of the complexity. NTFS requires a lot of processing, as do most good modern desktop file systems. FAT is just a linked list more or less. It is extremely simple to implement.

For that matter the original FAT is also the ISO/IEC 9293 standard.

But please, don't let the facts get in the way of your two minutes of hate.

ntfs-3g is fine for everyday use now. you can write and everything, with no silly limitations.
The only caveat that I know about is that occasionally (for example if the disk was not
cleanly unmounted) you might need to connect the disk to a windows pc once or twice to
let windows 'fix' it.

really, my brother and I have been using it for a couple of years now with no problems, and
it is the standard way of mounting ntfs partitions in any modern linux distro.

having said that, if your WD thing supports ext3, i would say try the 'ext2 ifs' driver for windows.
at http://www.fs-driver.org/
it is good enough for read access in windows.
and it works ok for writing though in my experience it occasionally refuses to delete a file.

Sure, there's an Ext3 driver for windows, but from what I've seen it's not that good.

Which particular driver are you referring to? There are a few.

Personally, I use Ext2 IFS in Windows (it works for Ext3 too) and it is, hands-down, the stablest and best Ext2/3 Windows driver I've used. Every other one I've tried would have stability issues; with IFS I don't have to worry. (There's been precisely *one* time in pretty much years that the driver crashed on me, and that's when I was doing something weird and stupid; I don't remember what. But more importantly, it didn't do anything bad to the filesystem in that crash.)

So, you want an installable file system. You mean like this?

Ext2 Installable File System For Windows

I'm not sure why the GP referred to the sysinternals utility when there is a freeware installable filesystem driver available.

There are several quality open source programs I always use on Windows. Most know the big ones...Firefox and OpenOffice. Open Source advocates need to familiarize yourself with http://www.fs-driver.org. They have created an ext2 driver for windows. If this driver gains in popularity, it will be one less "Microsoft tax" you pay on your gadgetry.

What are our options for truly cross-platform read-write filesystems these days? FAT32? Ext2? Filesystem lock-in is just the reality, unfortunately, and there's not much one can do to change it. But as long as there are cross-platform dump and restore tools, and as long as files themselves are portable, I really don't see much of a problem.

If those chaps at MS really have time to spare to add this 128 bit instruction gimmick while everyone and his dog is still stuck with 32 bit drivers then why don't they actually use that effort to do something usefull?

I for one, would love it if MS implemented some of the alternative filesystems around like ext3/4 or reiser so I won't have to rely on third party filesystem drivers to access my dualboot shared partition. Ever tried Ext2 IFS on Vista? Good luck. UAC won't allow any executables running from a third party filesystem.

The problem is caused by Vista's internals: There is some code that compares whether the name of the file system type is one of the following: "NTFS", "FAT", "FAT32", "CDFS", "NPFS", "MSFS" or "UDF". If there is a match, it is one of Microsoft's file system types and a lot of code is skipped in the Multiple UNC Provider (MUP) implementation of Vista. If the file system type is a third-party type, for example "Ext2", some code runs in the MUP of Vista that always generates an ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER error status code due to a bug of Vista.

source

The whole point is sharing my data which means in my case it will contain a mix of warez, music, sci-fi, anime, code projects and windows and linux executables. Not being able to execute from it is unacceptable.

Turning it around would mean using an experimental ntfs driver built using a reverse engineered, patent encumbered filesystem that keeps changing with every iteration of windows.

Of course it's all in MS's interest to keep interoperabillity as low as legally possible...

Wow... I've really gone offtopic this time.

What about ext3 formatted with a small fat32 partition that contains Ext2 IFS for windows. Now it's portable, can be read in linux natively, and if you plug it into a windows machine, you just install the ext2 IFS and then mount your ext3 filesystem.

"Sure you could use Ext3, or Reiser, or BTFS, or something else, but then you can't use your flash drive on any machine, thus defeating it's purpose."

Unless you made a tiny fat partition at the start of the drive containing this.

Odd, I don't use Linux, and the simple choice is still EXT2. Primarily I use Windows and FreeBSD.

The thing is, ext2 doesn't have the size limit of FAT32, it handles hard links properly, and it's available on pretty much any OS (well, any *BSD, Windows, Linux, and MacOS).

And before you say windows can't use EXT2, yes it can. That's the nicer driver, there are several that let you access EXT2 with an FTP like client. This one actually lets you mount the drive.

I just make sure Linux and FreeBSD have my account on the same UID, and Windows seems to default to superuser mode.

Then, if I need to preserve Linux file settings I'll zip, tar, or cpio and store them on the stick that way.

Good idea, but a pain in the neck if you need to moved files often, as I do. My solution for two machines in particular (one Fedora, one WinXP) was to install an ext2 driver on the Windows box --- http://www.fs-driver.org/ --- and use ext2 on the USB key. Permissions are retained.

I use ext2 on my USB flash thumb and ext3 on my portable HD along with http://www.fs-driver.org/ for mu WinXP work machine.

I had the exact same problem a while back. My solution was a little less straightforward than some, but is still simple enough. Basically, I leverage the freeware software Ext2 IFS, which installs software onto Windows that allows it to recognize the contents of Ext2/3 partitions.

Basically, I have my disk formatted with two partitions:

• A 1GB FAT32 Partition
• The rest as an Ext3 Partition

On the FAT32 partition, I place the latest version of Ext2 IFS. When I access the system on my main Linux box, I just mount / use the Ext3 partition.

When I visit friends or family and I plug it into their Windows box for the first time, Windows recognizes the FAT32 partition, so I can install the Ext2 IFS software that I put onto that partition. From then on (and every subsequent access), Windows automatically mounts it!

Windows doesn't reflect the Ext3 permissions, but if you have physical, portable access to an unencrypted hard drive, those mean nothing anyway. And, of course, make sure to ask friends and family before installing filesystem drivers :)

If you don't want much hassle, just use explore2fs (http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs). It's an userland application which does not install any drivers or the like on Windows, and as such will execute as any user. However, you'll still need to transport it to the machines you'll want to use, and thus you'll need a tiny space of FAT32 for doing the trick.

If you have rights to install drivers on the windows machines you use, you can try the EXT2 driver available on www.fs-driver.org. It will mount your EXT2/EXT3 volume as a drive letter so you can transfer files between partitions.

Ext2 IFS does autostart. You have to go into the control panel and tell it which drives to mount once, but after that it does it automatically every time you boot.

* Inodes that are larger than 128 bytes are not supported.
* Access rights are not maintained. All users can access all the directories and files of an Ext2 volume. If a new file or directory is created, it inherits all the permissions, the GID and the UID from the directory where it has been created. There is one exception to this rule: a file (but not a directory) the driver has created always has cleared "x" permissions, it inherits the "r" and the "w" permissions only. See also section "What limitations arise from not maintaining access rights?".
* The driver does not allow accessing special files at Ext2 volumes, the access will be always denied. (Special files are sockets, soft links, block devices, character devices and pipes.)
* Alternate 8.3-DOS names are not supported (just because there is no place to store them in an Ext2 file system). This can prevent legacy DOS applications, executed by the NTVDM of Windows, from accessing some files or directories.
* Currently the driver does not implement defragging support. So defragmentation applications will neither show fragmentation information nor defragment any Ext2 volume.
* This software does not achieve booting a Windows operating system from an Ext2 volume.
* LVM volumes are not supported, so it is not possible to access them.

What do you mean? Vista doesn't support ext2 by default, but I've used this driver on XP and Vista without any trouble at all. I don't think not supporting something out of the box equates to making something hard to do.

If you wanted to implement a file system on top of Windows, there's nothing to prevent you from doing so. It's not as if Windows uses AI to scan your code and displays an error message like "You are running a patent-free filesystem, application will close".

Funny you should say that ...

From http://www.fs-driver.org/relnotes.html:

Running programs on an Ext2/Ext3 volume on Windows Vista

Currently it is not possible to start a program on Vista if UAC is enabled and the program's executable is stored on an Ex2/Ext3 volume. An "invalid parameter" message box appears, but the program does not start.

UAC is the feature of Vista that prompts the user to elevate the user privileges to administrator level when necessary. UAC is enabled by default. It is not recommended to disable it.

The problem is caused by Vista's internals: There is some code that compares whether the name of the file system type is one of the following: "NTFS", "FAT", "FAT32", "CDFS", "NPFS", "MSFS" or "UDF". If there is a match, it is one of Microsoft's file system types and a lot of code is skipped in the Multiple UNC Provider (MUP) implementation of Vista. If the file system type is a third-party type, for example "Ext2", some code runs in the MUP of Vista that always generates an ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER error status code due to a bug of Vista.

Actually, if you follow the links, it sounds like deliberate behaviour by Microsoft. If true Microsoft are asking for trouble with this. They change the behaviour for their own file system types, and generate an error for any other:

Quoting from the fsdriver.org site:

"Currently it is not possible to start a program on Vista if UAC is enabled and the program's executable is stored on an Ex2/Ext3 volume. An "invalid parameter" message box appears, but the program does not start.

UAC is the feature of Vista that prompts the user to elevate the user privileges to administrator level when necessary. UAC is enabled by default. It is not recommended to disable it.

The problem is caused by Vista's internals: There is some code that compares whether the name of the file system type is one of the following: "NTFS", "FAT", "FAT32", "CDFS", "NPFS", "MSFS" or "UDF". If there is a match, it is one of Microsoft's file system types and a lot of code is skipped in the Multiple UNC Provider (MUP) implementation of Vista. If the file system type is a third-party type, for example "Ext2", some code runs in the MUP of Vista that always generates an ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER error status code due to a bug of Vista."

source: http://www.fs-driver.org/relnotes.html

I was initially skeptical because of your abusive use of "unpatented" all over the place, as if this is solely about patents. You don't provide any clear links here, but 2 clicks away, I found this:

The problem is caused by Vista's internals: There is some code that compares whether the name of the file system type is one of the following: "NTFS", "FAT", "FAT32", "CDFS", "NPFS", "MSFS" or "UDF". If there is a match, it is one of Microsoft's file system types and a lot of code is skipped in the Multiple UNC Provider (MUP) implementation of Vista. If the file system type is a third-party type, for example "Ext2", some code runs in the MUP of Vista that always generates an ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER error status code due to a bug of Vista.

Bug or on purpose? Who knows.

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

Why, it's almost as if Microsoft don't want to inter-operate. Ext3 is fully documented with viewable code, yet MS don't implement it.

MS don't need to. Ext2 Installable File System For Windows

I'm in the same boat. For years I've been looking for a file system can hold files larger than 2GB and can be mounted from Windows and Mac OS X (and maybe Linux).

How about ext2? You can mount it with full read/write access both in Windows, and in OS X.

As my sibling post said, http://www.fs-driver.org/ is a Windows File System driver drive ext2, and thanks to forward compatibility (as I understand it), ext3 works too. http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd is another alternative.

You should be warned that whenever I've used the first tool to write to the partition, I've ended up with Ubuntu fscking it on boot. But I've never noticed any problems like data corruption from using it. The second one also seems OK, although when browsing the disk from the Command Prompt it shows entries for . and .. in the root, which confuses dir.

ext2/3 can be resized offline, ext4 may have online resize too. i can also read ext2 partitions from windows (see http://www.fs-driver.org/)

and undeletion should never be needed :)

Uh... There is already a (non GPL) IFS driver for windows (link here), and both Mac OSX and the libre BSDs have (at least read only) ext2 support. Just because the original code is GPL doesn't mean you can't never ever do an alternative implementation (GPL doesn't restrict Reverse Engineering)

No it couldn't be ext2/3/4 because of the GPL. It just couldn't so give that idea up.

Absolutely wrong. It couldn't be the *Linux implementation* of ext2/3/4, because of the GPL. But there's nothing to stop someone else from creating a new extN implementation under an arbitrary, non-GPL license: in fact, it's already been done.

What really need to happen is something similar to what happened to the GIF file format. In that case it was decided to develop a new image file format called PNG. There is room for doing the same thing with the file system. Although FAT is common, if everyone could agree an open alternative, and then encourage hardware manufacturers to provide the necessary drivers to Windows users, then we could finally move forward.

You mean like? http://www.fs-driver.org/ Now just go and convince everyone to use it. :)

Note that they never sere alleging violation of FAT32 patents, merely long name support.

When you say "Nobody supports anything else" I presume you mean in small devices, cameras, phones, thumb drives, etc.

But use of other file systems on such devices would be no worse than distributing drivers (like was done for Win98) and using EXT2/3/4.

A high quality windows driver released free and clear for that pretty much flips the coin on Microsoft. There are several of these out there: ( http://www.fs-driver.org/ http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/ ) but its not clear that they are robust enough for device vendors to ship millions of units with.

Apparently someone did develop an EXT2 driver for Windows, which is available for free: http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

It would be easy for manufacturers (such as TomTom) to include some modified version of this on their install CDs: http://www.fs-driver.org/ to allow Windows users to access their ext2/3 formatted discs.

I don't see why that would be a problem. This is the right solution here.

Yes. However, it mounts an ext3 drive as ext2, so you don't have journaling. Incredibly useful for fetching data off ext2/3 partitions when you don't feel like burning a livecd.

you made it so your OS *only* supports file systems that you hold patents for.

If Microsoft only supporting patented filesystems is a real issue, camera makers can include Windows drivers for unpatented file systems.

- Sam

There are Windows drivers for ext2 and ext3:

(i) Installable filesystem for Windows http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

(ii) Explore2fs http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs

In my experience, both work very well for reading but they are not quite reliable for writing.

And with this I could read the Linux drive in Windows. So I need a way to have both drives active, but change their device order. But for just reading Windows in Linux and not the other way around, it would be as simple as switching the Linux drive on and off and making sure it is always first when it's on.

Would "unsupported filesystem" really make you feel that much better? I don't think it would.

That being said, you actually get get windows to recognize ext2/3.

http://www.fs-driver.org/

What about ext2 and other filesystems then?

Ninety percent of desktop PCs run Windows, and for interchange among the public, file systems that most PCs running Windows cannot read aren't worth testing. If you format your USB drive as ext2 and carry it to someone else's PC, you'll need to 1. carry a CD or a second USB drive with the ext2 driver and 2. get admin rights in order to install it on someone else's PC. It'd be like the Windows 9x days, when you needed to carry a floppy disk with the USB mass storage class driver whenever you used someone else's computer.

you can access ext3 as ext2 on windows with http://www.fs-driver.org/

Both win and linux have support for ext3, which is what I use for my "media" drive on my dual boot laptop. I think that FreeBSD supports that too, but as I don't use it, I could be wrong.

http://www.fs-driver.org/
I think the maximum inode size is 128 so make sure that is how you format it.

Not, strictly speaking, true...

The NTFS-3g driver for Fuse works very well, at this point, and there are ext2/3 drivers for Windows if you look for them (Albeit the free one that I know about doesn't handle journaling in Ext3).

Here you go!

My personal favorite setup is having an ext3 home directory in Linux, and using the My Documents folder in NTFS as a media directory.

Slight annoyance of having two desktops, but other than that, pretty ideal.

I have fought with SAMBA on Ubuntu 8.04 server and I cant get it going faster than 10-11MB/sec when copying to/from Windows XP. ...Someone once told me SAMBA will always be slow but I don't believe that to be true.

Well, for SAMBA tuning, try (pdf):

http://tinyurl.com/5rfjvu

Alternatively, if you don't need all the Win network support that SAMBA provides, you can install ext2ifs on the XP boxes and enjoy easy and fast access to your *nix volumes. Works well for me. Caution: Security issues...

http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

The only real problem I have is there doesn't exist a modern journaling FS which would work just as well on all 3 platforms.

I agree with you that's really important. I'd also like zfs to be that filesystem. However, as long as you don't need that drive to be the root drive of your respective file system, you might be interested in some of these links:

I can use ext3, but cannot plug it into a Mac.

Give this a try. The latest news is that you get write support in Tiger, but I use it in Leopard without problems.

Also don't worry about the ext2 part. Ext3 is designed to be backwards compatible with ext2. It can be mounted as ext2 (it just won't get journaling)

You didn't ask for it, so you might already know about this windows driver. There are actually a couple out there, I think that one works the best (which is kind of unfortunate, because it's freeware, but proprietary).

I can use NTFS, but cannot write to it on a Mac.

Sure you can, same way you do it in Linux, through fuse and ntfs-3g.

I can use Mac's FS, but cannot plug it into Windows (unless I pay for a proprietary driver every time I use that disk on a different machine)

Yeah, you got me there. MacDrive works really well, but I'd like a non-proprietary version myself.

For a removable drive that you can plug in anywhere, I'd go with ntfs actually. No FAT size restrictions, no permissions (actually a plus for a removable drive), and most linux distributions come with ntfs-3g installed by default. That means you only have to install the driver in mac os x