Lifehacker made a great find the other day that all of the dual-booters will surely enjoy. They came across a free application, called Linux Reader, that gives Windows users the ability to access files from a Linux partition.
From the screenshot it may appear as though Linux Reader integrates directly into Windows Explorer, but that’s not the case. It’s a standalone program that you’re required to install (unless you grab the portable version), and after that you’ll be able to access files located on an Ext2/Ext3 Linux file system partition.
The only downside that I’ve seen to using this is that it doesn’t offer two-way communication. By that I mean you can read files from a Linux partition, but you’re not actually able to save them. From what I’ve found full read/write access to Linux partitions in Windows is much harder to come by.
Of course Ubuntu 7.10 already comes packed with full NTFS support, which means you’ll be able to read from and write to any Windows partition. We’ve already shown one way you can take advantage of this, but it would still be nice to have an easy way for writing to a Linux partition in Windows.
“It would still be nice to have an easy way for writing to a Linux partition in Windows.”
Your wish is my command! You should check out this plugin called Ext2IFS. I’ve been using it since what seems forever and unlike Linux Reader, it *does* integrate with Windows Explorer. But there’s more. You can write to it as if it was a Windows hard drive, so you can both read and write files to Linux partitions thanks to this driver. I’m not sure if it will run on Vista machines though.
Link: [fs-driver.org]
Now if only someone could clone the XP Explorer for Vista users.
Ext 2IFS has problems in Vista. it even does not run properly in windows 2000. I’ve had to reinstall it often. A similar alternative to Linux Reader is Explore 2fs. slightly primitive but very fast.
But one problem is unresolved in each of these. Reiserfs is not supported. its not even recognized. in general these software have problems with journalling file systems.
As Tinhed pointed out it does have some problems working on Vista. I tried this out over the summer, but it wasn’t working right on Vista so I decided to ditch it.