For those of you that have been following my saga on IRC for the previous 2 nights, I have been attempting to use my Ext3-formatted 500Gb external hard drive over a Firewire800 connection from my Windows Vista machine. After about 10 hours of debugging, including over 40 reboots, I finally got it working.
The problem that held me up for such a long time was the failed drivers for the firewire stack. The firewire800 card I installed came with a driver CD which installed the hardware driver, and also installed an additional firewire stack called ub1394. (http://www.unibrain.com/download/download.asp) Well, this turned out to be the problem. The ubCore stuff didn't work with my external drive, which is actually 2 devices in one, with hardware RAID, etc. so the device never actually showed up as a disk which could be partitioned or assigned as a volume. Once I uninstalled the ubCore stuff and reverted back to the Vista-default ohci1394.sys, the drive/volume list was detected almost instantly (after the reboot of course) For accessing the ext3 filesystem I installed Ext2Fsd (http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/projects/projects.htm) and so far have been really impressed. I was able to copy about 63Gb of stuff to the drive in about an hour (over Firewire800). So far I have been able to create new directories, drag/drop/delete files from Windows Explorer, and the filesystem has remained a valid ext3 volume. (Assuming you have the right underlying drivers for firewire or usb or sata or whatever your disk is on...) if you have a need to read an ext3 formatted disk into a Windows system, I have found ext2fsd to be pretty good, and quite a bit easier to configure than some of the other ext2/3 IFS's for Windows. Some screenshots attached.
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