Read EXT drives in Windows

We all know that Linux can read NTFS partitions. Right? Well maybe. Maybe not. But you can. NTFS-3G works great and it comes installed with Ubuntu. I hate to say it, but I still have to dual boot sometimes. So while I spend 95% of my time in Linux, I still game everyonce in a while with Windows. Its nice to be able to grab files from Windows while I'm in Ubuntu.

Its especially handy when I find out that I can run yet another game in Wine or Cedega. I can often just go and grab save files or configurations from the Windows partition when I set it up in Linux. I did this with both City of Heroes and with Wow. Both of which run faster in WINE under Linux than they did in Windows.

So what happens when I need to read a Linux EXT3 partition from Windows? Well its easier than you think! Firstly we can thank the EXT3 design for being backwards compatible with EXT2. Because there is a great EXT2 driver for windows called fs-driver (Often called IFS). There is no journaling support because it is using the partition in EXT2 mode. In fact, if for some reason you try to use an EXT3 partition that still has data in its journal, IFS won't mount it at all.

I use it all the time when I'm in Windows. Especially with my external usb drive.  A friend of mine just let me know of a newer EXT2 projec. Its called EXT2fsd. Its been around since 2002! I haven't used it yet, but I think I'm going to try it out on one of my systems. This project will support replaying a journal on the EXT3 partition. Very cool! But it will not yet support journalling. At least I could mount a drive that was "dirty" though. It looks like they plan to add journalling support and even LVM support! That would be cool. 

I'm really excited about EXT2fsd and I can't wait until they implement journaling and fully support EXT3! Go check them out.