Writing to ext3 fs from XP

[Hadders]

Jonathan Berry wrote:
> On 12/4/06, Hadders <fedora at workingwithit.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>   Just wondering if anybody has had any experience of writing to an ext3
>> partition within windows.
>>
>> If found this driver, http://www.fs-driver.org/ . Sound goods, but only
>> has ext2 support.
>>
>> Does anybody know of anything similar for ext3?
>
> ext3 is completely backwards compatible with ext2.  Thus, you can
> mount an ext3 partition as an ext2 one, you just won't get the added
> benefits of ext3 (like journaling).  I have used a Windows ext2 driver
> in the past and it worked fairly well.  I stopped using it, though,
> because one day I had to pull the power when in Windows and the next
> time I booted Linux, the ext3 filesystems had error and had to be
> fixed (which wasn't as easy without the journal).  That scared me :-).
>
> For what you want to do, NTFS may be a good solution.  As others have
> noted, the new ntfs-3g driver for Linux seems to work fairly well.
>
> Jonathan
>
Hmmm, so what you're saying is the driver works fine unless you drop the 
power to the box. That's not a problem for me, I have a UPS and I can't 
remember the last time I had to hold in the ATX switch for 10 seconds to 
force a cut-out.   Also, I'll be running the partition on a RAID 1 
mirror, that may fix an odd half-write inconsistency from the other 
disk, .. maybe, depends which it believes is the correct disk.

But the ntfs-3g driver works "fairly well"...

Sounds like either way I run the risk of something going wrong, at some 
point.

I think I'll hedge my beats and split the disk into an NTFS and ext3 
partition, one for each OS for backup.  After all, at 60GB each, I will 
have a fair amount of room for backups and really, if I had 120GB, I'd 
just get lazy and fill it up eventually.