Accessing an EXT2/3 drive in windows

[Mike]

Yesterday I was bimbling away (yes that is a word - honest!:D) on my PC copying stuff back and forth from my Synology NAS when suddenly it lurched and stopped communicating :eek:. In cold panic I reseated the network cable at both ends, shut the NAS down and reboot - but with no effect - it just blinked it's Ethernet LED at me myopically with no light at all from the disc access LED.
Now my NAS contains all my latest drivers, utilities, game patches, OS images, etc. - gigabytes upon gigabytes of information. And of course I had not backed up.
I know, I know! I should know better. But hey data loss never happens to me- only to other people... :rolleye::D
Anyhoo, I shut the NAS down, opened it up and pulled out the Western Digital 1TB Green Edition Hard disc forlornly thinking the worst - that the drive or the NAS (or both) had died. I popped the drive into my PC and tried to access it. Of course it's Linux and guess what? I didn't have a Linux installation at the time and no PCs/drives free for to temporarily install to. I toyed with the idea of installing Linux into some Virtual software but then found this little gem: The Ext2 Installable File System (IFS)
It can be found here and is totally free of charge: http://www.fs-driver.org/
Not only did it see the drive but I could access and retrieve the data - even though parts of the file system were totally mangled. So apart from my battlefield 2142 patches I got everything back (woot!).
So if you run into a similar problem and you're feeling lazy and/or don't have a spare box to install Linux to then try the Ext2 IFS (which works on EXT3 btw).

P.S. And the moral of the story is to back up regularly! :D
P.P.S. So far so good the file system was corrupt but the NAS and the drive itself seem fine :thumbs:

[EDIT] if any of you guys know of similar software then feel free to post it as long as it's freeware and you're not affiliated with it/the company that made or distributes it. Spammers will be shot. Twice.

[sniperdude]

or you could run this from a usb pen drive or cd http://www.slax.org/


failing that

any of these should do it
http://www.livecdlist.com/


always handy to have when a OS is beyond repair and you need to format the drive but backup data from the corrupt OS first

[Mike]

Indeed! I did try a LiveCD (Ubuntu 9.04) but it would not mount the drive properly.

[system7]

Sounds like a hair-raising moment, Mike...:eek:

I do know the technicalities of this. EXT2/3 file system is a fully documented spec, so writing a windows driver is straightforward to the coders, and hence you can copy the files to a Windows PC.

NTFS is not documented by MS, so the Linux NTFS drivers, which are a bit of a hack by the Linux community, are best used just to read Windows files. If you use linux to write files to an NTFS partition, you risk it all going horribly wrong.

For that matter, I've never had much luck with NTFS partitions created in Linux by utilities like GPartEd.

[Mike]

I've never had problems with NTFS from GPartEd *pauses for the bang and puff of smoke*. What kind of problems have you run into with it?

[Bracken]

Be aware that this driver is for ext2 only.

By design, an ext3 drive can be mounted as if it was ext2, by an ext2 driver, so you get no journalling while it's mounted by an ext2 driver.




I have had troubles with windows not seeing NTFS partitions created by free tools.

[system7]

I've never had problems with NTFS from GPartEd *pauses for the bang and puff of smoke*. What kind of problems have you run into with it?
Stuff like trying to delete a Linux partition, then using gparted to extend the Windows XP partition to use the freed space.

Seemed to create endless file errors or the usual stuff like can't find Win32 boot failure.

Creating partitions seemed easy enough, but only Windows seems to create a reliable NTFS file system.

[Mr Grapes]

yep, using that driver on this very laptop which has both win XP and Ubuntu. both OS's can access all partitions :D
very useful indeed!

[Mike]

Stuff like trying to delete a Linux partition, then using gparted to extend the Windows XP partition to use the freed space.

Seemed to create endless file errors or the usual stuff like can't find Win32 boot failure.

Creating partitions seemed easy enough, but only Windows seems to create a reliable NTFS file system.
Hmmm you can run into that with other partitioning tools such as Partitioin Magic 8, etc as well. It's all about aligning partitions but yes it's a bit of a mine field. Always good to backup first before trying a manual shift or resize of a partition imho :xsmile:.

[Bracken]

I've never had a problem removing ext3 and expanding NTFS into the space. I've always done a file-system check and de-fragment 1st though.

I have had trouble making NTFS partitions that windows can see though.

Also, formatting floppy disks with FAT, linux just cannot do it. Windows simply ignores the disk.

[waba]

:| is it a bad idea to delete files in a windows partition whilst in ubuntu then? all my music is in windows, but as i use linux i just mount the partition and run it from there...and sometimes i delete a few files here or add a few there...bad idea then?!

[mrgoose]

Debatable waba. ntfs3g (http://www.ntfs-3g.org/) is a great improvement on its predecessors. I have used it to write and delete files on NTFS volumes without problem. The main trouble is that there is no proper fsck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsck) (filesystem check) for ntfs volumes yet. The NTFS version of fsck is called ntfsck (http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsck) and it has been in the pipeline for many years but it still isn't ready, unfortunately. So if you remove the drive without unmounting, or if it becomes corrupt, then you have to resort to a Windows machine and use chkdsk to fix it. Moreover if you write further data to an NTFS volume that aready has filesystem errors then you are likely to mess it up badly.

For more info regarding what is currently available for managing NTFS volumes, please see:-
http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsprogs

Hope this helps,

Best wishes, G

[waba]

cheers goose, i shall be more careful in future!

[mrgoose]

Yeah, IMHO its definitely a case of, "Proceed with caution!"

Best wishes, G.