ext2ifs vs ext2fsd

[pxc]

I'm currently using ext2ifs (1.10c) to access my ext3 filesystems from Windows XP.

But recently, multiple times, the stupid thing has choked, locking up every application accessing the partition, most notably explorer. I have to do a hard reset on the machine, and then the filesystem is so fucked up I can't even do a normal (automatic repair) fsck on it. I get corrupted/missing files and all sorts of other shit. To top it off, the volume is huge, so it takes a long time to repair.

Is ext2fsd any better? I've heard good things and bad things about it. The bad things are mostly convenience issues.

Performance/Stability?

[pxc]

Update:

Well, I think I'll just give ext2ifs the boot right now.

I just lost a huge fucking chunk of the filesystem, including the biggest assignment and only hope for a class I'm failing right now, my CD keys, all of my ISOs for all of my games (all of which I legally purchased and few of which I have working original CDs for).

Meanwhile, fsck is failing at life.

FUCK ME.

[TheTankengine]

I used ext2fsd on XP and it worked very well. I had a very limited amount of problems. Then I switched to Vista and, basically, all functionality dropped off for me. Then I switched to ext2ifs and it at least worked, though not terribly well. As of late, I'm pretty sure ext2ifs has corrupted my Vista HDD so that it no longer appears that there are any partitions on it, according to gparted. As a bonus: It's a Maxtor 250GB HDD, and on the POST screen it now claims that it is an "Iaktor 120 GB" HDD.

So... I guess ext2fsd worked reasonably well for me in XP but not in Vista. ext2ifs really fucked up on Vista, but at least it worked for a little bit.

Wow, some endorsement, huh?

Note:I rarely used XP and rarely use Vista and don't keep any important files on those partitions, so the whole thing isn't terribly important to my computing use.

[pxc]

As of late, I'm pretty sure ext2ifs has corrupted my Vista HDD so that it no longer appears that there are any partitions on it, according to gparted.

That's exactly what happened to my ext3 media partition.

I lost a lot of data. When I ran fsck against the damn thing, fsck raped the partition such that it corrupted the superblock, and the first alternative superblock. When doing data recovery, I was only able to find my music (which I have backups of) and not the data I really needed. Most of the files that did remain were corrupted (wrong file sizes).

I'm not looking forward to Vista anyway.

[DragonHawk]

Found this thread from another thread, so I'm coming in late, sorry.

I'm pretty sure ext2ifs has corrupted my Vista HDD ... As a bonus: It's a Maxtor 250GB HDD, and on the POST screen it now claims that it is an "Iaktor 120 GB" HDD.

Wow. That is pretty fucked up right there. That implies it scrambled the drive's firmware. Have you tried finding a manufacturer diagnostic utility (I think Maxtor provides one on their website) and running it against the drive? I'm not saying it didn't happen (I've seen enough weird stuff happen with computers that I'll believe anything), but that's sufficiently weird that I'd still want to run more tests, just in case something else bad was going on.

ext2ifs really fucked up on Vista

Vista is really fucked up on Vista.

----

When I ran fsck against the damn thing, fsck raped the partition such that it corrupted the superblock, and the first alternative superblock.

That almost sounds like the partition table got corrupted, and so fsck was working on the wrong disk blocks. I wonder if Vista is seeing the partition table differently than Linux is? Partitions on the IBM-PC are a mess. OSes basically have to "guess" at how the software that wrote the partition table was "seeing" the disk. When they guess wrong, Bad Things Happen. As in "don't cross the streams" bad. I know Vista was supposed to introduce all sorts of radical improvements in disk storage management. Most of that evaporated, but I wonder if Microsoft still changed something important, or is writing extra "signatures" to the disk and scrambling things for Linux.

I was only able to find my music (which I have backups of) and not the data I really needed.

There are two kinds of people: Those who make backups, and those who will wish they had.

I've got a huge (200+ GB) "packrat" partition, full of ripped CDs and old software and ISOs and such. I don't back it up (too big, not worth much to me, and mostly reproducible). So I know that eventually, I'm going to loose it. While I accept that, it's still not going to be any fun at all.

[pxc]

Haha. As it turns out, my iPod/my friend's computer has almost all of the music, including the stuff I lost. He also has almost all of my ISOs, and at a recent LAN party I picked up a few more and borrowed a few friends computers to make images of my own more quickly. I re-did the project, which has not been graded yet. I just repartitioned that HDD such that those images that require heavy-duty hard-drive access are on an NTFS partition, and things like documents and music are on the ext3 one (since I also want to get to those on Linux). Seems to be working out.

[phlip]

I trust IFS in general and ext2ifs in particular about as far as I can throw the Eiffel tower. I just use explore2fs on the rare occasion I'm in Windows and need to access something form the Linux partitions... it works well enough. I imagine I'd probably find it annoying, though, if I had to do it regularly... and the read-only thing can be annoying sometimes. But it's enough if you only need to use it occasionally, and don't want to trust the integrity of your linux partition to IFS.

[endolith]

EXT2IFS doesn't work for me. It asks if I want to format the drive. Now that I know it can fuck things up, I won't use it at all. What is the modern solution?

[endolith]

Ext2Fsd works, at least, and can be used read-only, so theoretically won't screw anything up. It doesn't read Unicode file names correctly, but I can still access them.

[cerbie]

EXT2IFS doesn't work for me. It asks if I want to format the drive. Now that I know it can fuck things up, I won't use it at all. What is the modern solution?

Quite the necro, but...

The modern solution is to have your Linux data partition be NTFS, mounted as ntfs-3g. As long as the main OS / doesn't have to use FUSE, there are no weird machinations, and you can use Windows to run CHKDSK.

[endolith]

Quite the necro, but...

I still don't understand why people say this.

[DragonHawk]

Quite the necro, but...

I still don't understand why people say this.

Short for "necropost", "necro-" (Greek) meaning "death". Some people consider it poor form to post in a thread which has not seen activity for some length of time.

Personally, I don't see how starting a new thread for an old issue (which quite possibly needs the old thread for context) could be a good thing, but some people see it that way.

One objection I've seen is that it people who watch for new threads will be confused by encountering an old conversation. The problem I have with that is there is great variation for the threshold for "old" , and how many threads they can mentally keep track of. Personally, I don't track the forums day-to-day -- both the forums and myself are too busy for that. So to me, *every* post is effectively a "necropost".

There's also the fact the forum software displays the date with every post.

But everyone's different, just like everyone else.

[endolith]

Personally, I don't see how starting a new thread for an old issue (which quite possibly needs the old thread for context) could be a good thing, but some people see it that way.

I guess they think it's preferable to start a completely new thread about the same topic, re-state some of the the same information in two different places, have people chasing info that was already found in the former thread, with multiple, redundant, partially overlapping google results for a search on the topic.

One objection I've seen is that it people who watch for new threads will be confused by encountering an old conversation.

Ah. So maybe it's a difference between a forum-centric point of view and a google-centric point of view?