At the Ubuntu conf yesterday a number of people brought up the issue of transfering files from linux to windows on a dual boot machine. Apparently the vast majority of people still use a FAT32 partition to do this (or a FAT32 formated removable drive like a USB stick). I just thought I'd point out to those on this list an alternative. No-one really worries about putting stuff onto FAT32 in windows to get from linux because linux can read NTFS partitions reliably. If windows could read ext2/ext3 partitions no-one would worry about putting stuff onto FAT32 in linux either. Well, it can be done!
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm
I managed get this working, although it really could be a lot easier. I downloaded ext2ifs-0.3.zip <http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/%7Ejn/linux/ext2ifs/ext2ifs-0.3.zip> but discovered that there's some bug with the installer program. The author has provided a fix for this on the same page, service-0.2b.exe <http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/%7Ejn/linux/ext2ifs/service-0.2b.exe> which I downloaded. It required some more fiddling, to actually see the buttons I had to press (which were anything but obvious). Step 1 was to install the driver. Step 2 was to "mount" the linux partition as a drive letter. This didn't work. There's 3 different ways to do it and none of them appeared to work. Step 3 was to start the driver, which although it appeared to work, didn't actually result in anything useful due to the failure of step 2.
I actually had to reboot to linux to get some files anyway, so I did that, using a usb stick to transfer them to windows. Upon rebooting I went to "My Computer" and discovered that my usb stick was no longer E:, it was a harddrive partition. Well that's interesting, so I double clicked on it and Microsoft kindly told me that this "drive" had not been formated and would I like to format it now! I very, very carefully clicked NO and then fired up the server-0.2b.exe file and performed step 3. Double clicking on the E: icon now gave me access to my linux partition.
So although I'm sure the average user could quite easily trash their computer with ext2ifs as it currently exists, I'm confident that with some polish it could be installed safely, with sensible defaults, such that a beginner would have no trouble accessing their linux partition. For a default Ubuntu installation which, I believe, puts /home on its own partition, this is probably the ideal partition to make available under windows.
Hope that was helpful to someone,
Trent Waddington -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
