Free Ext2 Ext3 driver for Windows
Barrapunto.com is reporting on a Noticias.com article (on another story by… sorry… got carried away.) Their reporting on a freely available Ext2 Ext3 driver for Windows. It should allow full read/write access (although I would quail at allowing Windows to write to ext2 or 3…. just me though.)
The site that has released it is fs-driver.org. It should work with NT, 2000, XP and Ext 2 support is supposedly what you get “out of the box”. For Ext3 they refer you to the FAQ which tells you that Ext3 is the same as Ext2 but with a journal. The upshot of this is you will access your Ext3 partition without the benefit of journaling.
This is apparently a kernel mode filesystem driver, so the ext2 or 3 partitions will get drive letters (g:) and be browsable in all programs. You can control which drive letter your partitions get via the control panel. It looks to even allow swapfile space on the “foreign” filesystems. I guess in essence, this makes them native as far as Windows is concerned.
It’s good to see another way of getting linux and windows to work together (share files) on the same system, but I would be a bit concerned about the reading and writing to an ext2 (or 3) partition from Windows. The fact that it ignores the journalling of ext3 also makes me a bit extra concerned. For some that may be just what they’ve been searching for though.