If like me you dual boot Windows and Linux, no doubt you will have come across the odd time when you have needed that über important document you need to work on urgently only to realise that it is saved on your Linux partition and you are logged in to Windows.
A while ago that type of situation would have forced me to reboot and login to Linux (which isn’t a bad thing), Luckily now with Ext2Ifs my Windows XP install can read my Linux partition. Despite it’s name Ext2Ifs is able to read both Ext2 and Ext3 (albeit with a few limitations).
According to the Authors (Stephan Schreiber) website EXT2IFS installs a pure kernel mode file system driver Ext2fs.sys, that actually extends the Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista operating system to include the Ext2 file system.
Once you have downloaded and installed EXT2IFS any Linux partitions that it detects will show up in Windows explorer exactly like any native Windows volumes you have attached.
Supported Features
- Complete reading and writing access to files and directories of volumes with the Ext2 or Ext3 file system.
- Allows Windows to run with paging files on Ext2 volumes.
- UTF-8 encoded file names are supported.
- The driver treats files with file names that start with a dot “.” character as hidden.
- Supports GPT disks if the Windows version used also does.
- Supports use of the Windows mountvol utility to create or delete drive letters for Ext2 volumes (except on Windows NT 4.0).
Unsupported Features
- Access rights are not maintained. All users can access all the directories and files of an Ext2 volume.
- The driver does not allow accessing special files at Ext2 volumes, the access will be always denied.
- Alternate 8.3-DOS names are not supported.
- Currently the driver does not implement defragging support.
- 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.
For more details about Ext2Ifs including download links head on over to www.fs-driver.org
