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Mount EX2/EX3 file system on win-98 system?


Guest wsxedcrfv

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Guest wsxedcrfv

I recently picked up a set-top media player and was trying to see if I could mount it's internal hard drive to my win-98 system. I was fooling around with a few public-domain packages (ext2ifs, explore2fs) and while explore2fs does run, it doesn't seem to like my drive. I don't exactly know what "inodes" are, but it could be that the ones on this drive are too large. I'm pretty sure this is an EXT3 drive, but if I understand the situation then anything that can read and write EXT2 can also do the same on EXT3.

Does anyone know if there's any software that runs under win-98 that can mount an EXT2/3 drive, and doesn't necessarily have a problem with "large inodes" ?

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Is there some reason you have to do this from Windows 98? Is the system "modern" enough to run some Linux distro's live CD? I'd think you could transfer files to the 98 drive from EXT3 (assuming that's what it is) or vice versa using a Live CD and mounting both drives.

Edited by Steven W
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Guest wsxedcrfv

( it seems ext2 ifs recent versions don't support win9x anymore but older did )

According to archive.org, the first initial public release of ext2 ifs was Ext2IFS_1_10.exe (Feb. 2005). I have to set KernelEx compatibility to something other than default (ie - win2k/sp4) or both the download package or the unpacked setup.exe will complain about the OS not being some version of NT. But the setup does run partially, but always ends with the message "This function is only valid in Win32 mode." I have no idea what function it's trying to do.

to do this but as already said: booting from a live linux CD would be more efficient and you might even like it.

As for efficiency, having the drive accessible under win-98 would be more efficient for me. I suppose I could tolerate booting a linux CD, but I'm sure I wouldn't like it...

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I used to use a ext2 filesystem driver on 98, fsdext2. This is developed by Peter van Sebille for Win95 (link), and ported to W98 by Gerald Schnabel. The page of Gerald Schnabel is no longer, but Archive.org has a copy. Unfortunately Archive.org didn't store the driver itself, but googling for fsdext2_0163.zip gives some hits.This driver is read-only, (luckily, you shouldn't write to an ext3 drive using an ext2 driver) and not rock-stable.

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Guest wsxedcrfv

I used to use a ext2 filesystem driver on 98, fsdext2.

Not to get too far away from this being win-98 related...

Is it possible to format a drive as EXT3 but have it use inodes that are 128 bytes - not 256 bytes?

One of these packages (ext2ifs, explore2fs - I forget which one) had implicit support for win-98, but not for EXT3. Even a lot of NT/XP packages seem to have problems with EXT3.

But here's my question: Are these incompatibilities only because the inodes are 256 bytes instead of 128, or is it that PLUS something else related to EXT3 ???

Hence my question - can I format a drive as EXT3 but use 128-byte inode size and still have it work with ext2ifs (or) explore2fs under win-98 ?

Alternate question: Why should my set-top linux-based media player care if I give it a hard drive pre-formatted as EXT2? Why would it insist on reformatting to EXT3? (I don't know yet if it will insist - I'm just asking ahead of finding out).

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The big difference in ext3 is the journal so as long as your media player set doesn't use raw tools to read the drive, it should be ok BUT you should be extra careful with ext2 partitions they must be always umounted cleanly if you don't want to loose data.

Also when formatting a ext2 partition with mke2fs you can set the size of the inodes with -I switch.

Some embedded devices need a specific size of inodes to be able to boot.

In my own experience, using ext3 isn't a good idea because it is a lot slower than ext2 and the journalizing doesn't give the safety it claims. I always ended with more problems with ext3.

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