EXT3 driver for Win2K?

[Stephen C. Tweedie]

Hi,

On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 18:26, Shaw, Marco wrote:

> I found a couple of projects that have created ext2 drivers for Win32,
> yet they are either read-only, or only support ext2 (cannot understand
> the journalling used in ext3 apparently).

Well, a cleanly-unmounted ext3 filesystem _is_ just ext2.  You can mount
an ext3 filesystem as ext2 quite happily, as long as the filesystem was
cleanly unmounted.  Just remember to unmount it again properly once
you're finished, else you'll be left with a long fsck before you can
mount it as ext3 again.

Ext3 does set a flag in the superblock to indicate that a journal
exists, but it's a "compatible" flag indicating that non-journaling ext2
drivers can mount the filesystem safely.  It's only when the fs is
active and mounted as ext3 that the journal becomes in-use and extra
incompatible ext3-only flags get set.

Cheers,
 Stephen