Submitted by Many people don’t know that Microsoft provides an Installable File System (IFS) SDK kit for writing filesystem drivers. This SDK provides necessary info for writing a filesystem driver to manage Linux/OS X drives from Windows 2000, XP or 2003 Server. Stephan Schreiber wrote an Ext2 IFS driver for Windows which supports Ext2 and Ext3 with read/write operations and almost everything else available under Linux except access rights, defraging and some other minor things.
Windows Ext2/3 Filesystem Driver
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Of course, the kit does cost $109… Also, the drivers can’t be WHQL certified, and Windows still can’t boot off of anything besides FAT and NTFS, even though IFS drivers are kernel-mode.
You don’t need the kit. You need the Windows DDK which is free and some free GPL’ed headers some guy made that act as a replacement for the IFS Kit ones.
See this website: http://www.insidewindows.info/
It has the header and other necessary information on writing your own drivers for free.
This is awesome. Seriously, this is really awesome. I hope this is good and stable because it could make a lot of people’s lives a whole lot more liveable to finally have fully compatible disks!
I’ve been using explore2fs up until now; I’ll give this a shot.
Also, for users who want to access Reiser partitions, there is YAReG (http://yareg.akucom.de/) – it doesn’t integrate into Explorer, but it allows you to access Reiser partitions. A bit slow, but it works.
call me when there’s reiserfs support, ext2/3 is nice but it’s not reiser.
Why the negative votes????
I’ve been suffering from Linux lock-in for a while, maybe I can use this to switch to Windows.
Easily the funniest comment I’ve seen online in some time. Don’t be anonymous next time, you!
I feel like down-rating you for fear that this site is turning into slashdot.
I actually didn’t know such a thing existed. Suprising given Windows’ dismal filesystem support.
I think i’ll stick with linux anyway.
It has a tendancy to crash Windows. At least with Explore2fs you only have the risk of a crash causing a single program to die. With an installable filesystem driver a crash will take down the entire machine.
lol…. I hope you’re joking.
Mount Everything is probably the only good software program and driver for Windows. All the others I have tried did not support all the functions or were unstable.
Actually, from what I hear the NT kernel is quite good. The weak link is most likely the win32 portion that sits above the kernel.
True, and from what I understand, with the new graphics layer planted ontop of DirectX (thus, making GDI a useless relic) – stability *SHOULD* in theory be better than before.
You’re right, NT is an ok kernel, but its the userspace that falls to pieces, personally, Microsoft should look at atleast considering the option of adopting an opensource core – heck, Solaris is probably the most scalable operating system out there – that would be a great base.
True, and from what I understand, with the new graphics layer planted ontop of DirectX (thus, making GDI a useless relic) – stability *SHOULD* in theory be better than before.
You seem to imply that doing graphics via DirectX will improve stability. How did you get that idea?
Doesn’t anyone read what I post?
If the blasted thing isn’t running in kernel space, the whole damn thing, in theory, shouldn’t come crash into a big screaming pile of heap.
In every case, graphical programs have to make calls into kernel space to put the data up onto the screen (you can’t write to hardware straight from user space). If there’s a bug in the data you write out to the video hardware, there’s gonna be a crash no matter where the code generating that data lies. Just look at the ability of X11 to bring Linux machines down. Sure the kernel is still kicking in there and you might be able to ssh into the box and restart it, but for all intents and purposes the computer is crashed if you can’t use the keyboard and the monitor.
DirectX also runs in the kernel, btw. It’s largely implemented in vendor-supplied drivers. GDI, on the other hand, is written by Microsoft whom I trust to know their own kernel.
Actually X11 with good (free) drivers will almost never bring Linux down. It will kill your monitor, kdb and mouse though. You can almost always get network access still…
The computer is not crashed if you can’t use the kbd and monitor. The kbd and monitor are “crashed.” Some problems like this just exist, and solving them isn’t going to happen overnight.
But I’d definitely say that the extra driver complications this will add will make Windows less stable overall.
I don’t trust Microsoft to know its own kernel. Microsoft is very much partitioned in its development scheme and the right hand is quite literally free to never watch what the left hand does. This is partially why the company can still get things done. Maybe they have some good internal magazine or something to keep everyone informed about technical things they need to know.
In every case, graphical programs have to make calls into kernel space to put the data up onto the screen (you can’t write to hardware straight from user space). If there’s a bug in the data you write out to the video hardware, there’s gonna be a crash no matter where the code generating that data lies.
This is not quite necessarily so. If the data is just pixel data, you can possibly end up with gibberish on the screen, but not a crash. If the data forms commands for the video card, you can indeed end up crashing it if you screw these up. The same goes for most types of hardware. Usually, a kernel does sanity checking on commands sent to hardware, but this costs performance. Video is usually an area where nobody is willing to take performance hits, which is why bugs in video drivers (which get increasingly complex) have such an impact on system stability.
GDI, on the other hand, is written by Microsoft whom I trust to know their own kernel.
Actually, parts of GDI are implemented in the driver level.
Does anyone know of an XFS driver?
would like to find one instead of switching my partition over to reiserfs or ext3.
would make it so much nicer when you have a larger linux partition than windows
isn’t that superfluous in linux?
Not completely true.
The very nature of hard disks and access to them will cause file fragmentation over time. Some filesystems handle this better than others. Also, most linux distributions go through automagic defragmentation.
Ooops forgot.
You cant benchmark anything from redmond without getting Tony Soprano to visit your shop.
Imagine if ext2/ext3 ran faster than NTFS.
Now what the hell?
I think an optimized ext2 implementation should be faster then NTFS, simply because it is a simpler file system, but we are past simply looking for raw speed, FAT is faster then NTFS, but features are now more important then raw speed, people are willing to pay an overhead for journaling, among other things.
ext3 is a better comparision, but even then it is hard to compare due to this driver not having access rights, let along ACLs.
A fully fledged and optimized ReiserFS driver would be interesting to compare performance.
And I think there could be some bragging rights if a OSS file system could plug in and out perform NTFS is stability and preformance while being effectivly transperent to the user (i.e. supporting everything that NTFS does).
I think an optimized ext2 implementation should be faster then NTFS, simply because it is a simpler file system, but we are past simply looking for raw speed, FAT is faster then NTFS, but features are now more important then raw speed, people are willing to pay an overhead for journaling, among other things.
You imply that FAT is a fast filesystem “because it’s simple”. However, FAT is quite inefficient both in terms of disk space usage and transaction speed.
Also, you should read its spec docs from MS for a laugh. For example, see here: http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/fatgen103.pdf
The document is full of “Don’t try to understand this, it seems to work”, special cases, magic numbers, etc.
what about all the OTHER file systems, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, squashfs and cramfs?
I installed it. And guess what, all my secure data is not that secure as I thought.
Whom to believe now?
I installed it. And guess what, all my secure data is not that secure as I thought.
If security of your data depended on nobody being able to access is solely because it’s on an ext2/3 file system, then your data was never secure, not even a teensy little bit. You were relying on security by obscurity. Anybody with physical access to the machine and a simple bootable CD would have been able to access it any time anyway.
Whom to believe now?
Your Data Security 101 teacher, for example.
I don’t know about Windows, but Linux has support for encrypted file sytstems. SUSE Linux has an option to have your file system encrypted in the installer and it’s not hard to find, I’m sure the other major distributions have that same option in an easily accessible part of the installer as well.
I don’t recall seeing anything in the Windows XP home installer that would allow me to have an encrypted file system, but I don’t install Windows that frequently either.
Encrypted file systems are used for very specific purposes such as embedded systems where you don’t want people to see *anything* on the FS. This isn’t the same. If you’re talking about file or directory security you can encrypt using PGP, which is available for all types of OS’s.
NB: The same goes for the other way around. If I boot into, say, BeOS, I can read all data on my NTFS partition just fine. No need to provide a password.
If you want to prevent this, you need to encrypt the actual data.
NB: The same goes for the other way around. If I boot into, say, BeOS, I can read all data on my NTFS partition just fine. No need to provide a password.
No need to boot into “say, BeOS”. It is MUCH easier with a Knoppix bootable CD/DVD. Leaves no traces
How about decent ntfs support in linux, as default. Now that would be tempting
How about decent ntfs support in linux, as default. Now that would be tempting
Unfortunately, there’s this nasty little thing called “software patents” standing in the way of that. That and the fact that NTFS is esentially undocumented (at least publicly). Oh sure, there’s some info out there, but not the full detail needed for a full implementation.
Um, like there’s default NTFS partition support in FreeBSD, at least FreeBSD version >=4.4 and earlier iirc. It’s also been available in the Linux machines I’ve dealt with in recent memory.
regards..
Not _full_ write support unfortunately tho.
Um, like there’s default NTFS partition support in FreeBSD, at least FreeBSD version >=4.4 and earlier iirc. It’s also been available in the Linux machines I’ve dealt with in recent memory.
Yes, but it’s not complete support, it’s only partial, and it’s not technically legal in some countries.
I’ve got all of my partitions under LVM. Is there a way to access those from Windows? This tool didn’t seem to be able to.
This is the perfect opportunity for me to mention ReiserDriver, which is an equivalent driver for ReiserFS. I am currently finishing up the project, although functional pre-releases are already available.
The project’s website is at http://rfsd.sf.net
The source code is based off of ext2fsd, which is a reasonably mature file system driver (around for much longer than the one mentioned in this post). FFSdrv is based off of the same architecture.
In the coming months, I may work towards unifying these codebases, and isolating further isolating file system-specific code, so that support for additional file systems can easily be added.
As the situation stands now, the IFS is one of the most complicated and least intuitive portions of the Windows kernel.
Lastly, I very much hope that the author of Ext2 IFS will open-source his work! (Note that there is also already John Newbigin’s driver of the same name, which is open-sourced). Actually, there are several Ext2 FS drivers, but there was never one for ReiserFS… until now!
Holy crap! This is incredible. How has this gone unnoticed? It should be on the front page of slashdot. I’ve been looking for this for months.
Hats off to you, Anonymous.
both of the file systems suck equally in my opinion. i hope longhorn and xfs both improve over the older FSs
Longhorn’s fs (winfs) is not really a new FS. It seems it will just be a SQL layer abstracting same old NTFS. “Virtual Folders” and raw NTFS will be both equally accesible, with a posibility of turning the SQL part off for weak systems.
At least that was the plan when idea of WinFS started to float.
Window and even DOS have always had IFS. It is how the network is hooked in. The docs for this used to cost $60K ten years ago.
There are a bunch of things hooked into IFS: NTFS, FAT, net, CDROM filesys. Only a few external vendors have ever implemented an IFS and they never shipped many copies.
I just installed this on my XP/Ubuntu laptop and it seems to work beautifully!
Fantastic code, to whomever wrote it!
Funny rhetoric:
except access rights, … and some other minor things
XP Home doesn’t have encryption, but XP PRO and Server 2000/2003 do. I don’t like it though, I use PGPDisk instead. Windows doesn’t create a separate file system like SUSE and PGPDisk do.
The built-in Windows encryption “transparently” encrypts files so that as long as you’re logged in, you have access to them. By default, you can copy them to a floppy and they become magically decrypted. If you encrypt a file called “my_plan_for_world_domination.doc” and have it saved in the root of the C: drive, then anyone logged into the machine will be able to see that you have a file called “my_plan_for_world_domination.doc” but they just won’t be allowed to open it.
If you re-install windows without backing up the key linked to your user name (or the administrator), then you’ll still be able to see all the encrypted files but you won’t have access to them anymore.
But it’s free and built-in, so it’s better than no protection at all.
If you _need_ to encrypt whole (windows) drives try this:
http://www.ce-infosys.com.sg/CeiNews_FreeCompuSec.asp
its free for Professional Business use as well as Personal use and suports “Pre boot access control” – that means if someone steals your drive, they still will be unable to access it the lamers way.
/r19
“and almost everything else available under Linux except access rights”
Yup. So call me a geek or whatever else, but I’ve been using xfs for about 4 years now. I’m not interested in anything ext2/3 related.
Until there’s no native windows support for xfs and reiserfs, nothing to see here.
That’s what I think about the proprietary Microseft Windows XP piece of shit.
This is I think one of the most wanted features about Linux/Windows cohabitation !
Excellent 🙂
the absolute last thing I want when dual booting is my valuable info on my linux harddrive being accessible with WRITE permissions from Windows..
“Encrypted file systems are used for very specific purposes such as embedded systems where you don’t want people to see *anything* on the FS. This isn’t the same. If you’re talking about file or directory security you can encrypt using PGP, which is available for all types of OS’s.”
There are filesystems out there, and there is encryption out there. Now you come and tell the world that there are no encrypted filesystems in use, and that there are only certain uses for it by some invisible barrier..? Whatever you are on about… You got that first bit perfectly right: Believe it or not, people encrypt discs so to prevent others from seeing *anything* on the FS. How PGP would be any better at that is beyond me.
Someone mentioned explore2fs. The same guy has had an IFS driver for quite a while, too: http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm
In my experience it’s pretty unstable, though, not as reliable as explore2fs at least.
“I’ve been suffering from Linux lock-in for a while, maybe I can use this to switch to Windows.”
Well how about NTFS lockin? Linux can transfer files to FAT and at times NTFS so knoppix CD’s will work for this. Personaly if you were stuck in linux for a while you would be aware to this fact.
Personaly I dont think they should see each other at all and should have a OS independent HDD filesystem. If this was the case microsoft viruses and linux attackers cant infect the other operating systems on a dual boot system.
I would rather face the linux attackers than windows viruses anyday of the week.. 1:100000000’s chance sounds good
No one in their right mind uses FAT for Windows and the only way for Linux to write to NTFS is -illegal-.
I’m with you. If I need to share data between Windows and Linux on a dual-boot, I create a (tiny) separate FAT partition mounted in both. As a matter of fact, the icon representing me at login in both Debian and XP is pulled from a GIF in such a partition, and my Firefox bookmarks are stored there too (so that both OSes’ implementation of FF use and update the same list).
No way in hell would I expose a Linux partition to Windows malware, and very little reason to do so.
thanks anonymous I love you.
Now, if I could just figure out wtf this “deviceharddiskpartition” thing you wrote in the readme means..
What about Paragone ext2fs Anywhere? Although it’s not free I think it’s very stable and fast and give you all read/write access to ext2/ext3
http://www.ext2fs-anywhere.com/
A while ago I also started working on this but for BSD filesystems.
http://source.tendra.org/viewcvs/winufs/trunk/
There’s one or two other projects that I am aware of that also this.
I wonder at the implication of using this header file (ntifs.h, GPLd) within the sources I have (BSDLd) and when offering a compiled binary when I resume this.
Whoa! What a day!
Now I can index the ext2fs AND reiserfs “drives” in MSN Desktop Search (or Copernic, or Google Desktop, etc)
Wow, great to make a backup on a Windows machine to a USB harddisk. I need to access the external harddisk with linux. FAT is no option for a 200 GB USB HDD, so this driver is really useful for me.
Matt rules with ext2fsd, “which is a reasonably mature file system driver, around for much longer than Stephan Schreiber’s Ext2 IFS” (as someone else wrote). But using it with USB devices is sometimes a hassle.
Stephan Schreiber’s Ext2 IFS may do for USB Harddisks and memory sticks, and is also easier to install and configure.
I hereby invite you to boycott the proprietary Microseft corporation and all its products. Don’t write software for the proprietary Microseft Windows XP operating system. Use free software, it doesn’t matter whether it’s *BSD, Linux or another free software project. The proprietary Microseft Windows XP operating system is the worst piece of shit since CP/M, avoid it at all costs!
Please Eugenio stop modding down comments that differ from your narrow opinion, ok?
I’ve been using ext2fsd (http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/) in read only mode for about 2 years now. Never had any major problems.
This is a key piece of software that was missing! Without it people were obliged to use (small) FAT partitions on large disks in dual-boot environments. So this driver is a very welcome addition!
However, the business world will want to wait to use such a driver. The reason being that if data can not be stored reliably, there is no point in having a computer. Reliability needs to be demonstrated in the case of storage software, before people start using it.
So I would be curious to see a list of bugs (either previously fixed bugs, or outstanding bugs). That will help people (businesses and individuals) become confident about reliying on that driver to store their precious data (either as main storage or backup).
It could also be useful to know if this driver is open source, so anyone could at least check the source.
A step in the right direction anyway!
Adding a point to frank’s reply: if instead you were looking for encrypting “automagically” some files within the FS, NTFS has some support of it aswell, exactly as for compressed files.
Thank you for worring about patents and the lack of official documentation. The good news is that if there was any patent on NTFS then it would be void in the developers’ countries. Moreover the needed technical information is already reverse engineered. The real reason still not having fully functioning NTFS is the lack of developer resources. NTFS is quite complex and most developers gave up working on it very quickly when they realize this.
Everybody keeps saying that NTFS has patents and that any NTFS implementation on Linux is illegal. Yada yada yada, but this is all FUD spread by a few zealots. Consider this:
1. The EU, as well as the majority countries in general, does NOT have software patents at all.
2. All OSS software uses methods and algorithms that is patented in the US. The NTFS code is not different from anything else.
Resier4 works. :p
That would be great! I have some FFS partitions, with some data on it, and would love to have a FS driver for windows. Now i have to copy it from UFS to a FAT32 partition, and then from FAT32 to NTFS in windows.
(are you btw the same guy working on DragonFly?(Holland, JR?) ) /Wiger van Houten
Yeah, that’s me.
Also ex-FreeBSD.
Right now you can mount the disks sort of. I need to get cracking at this again. But Windows programming at the lower level is scary stuff at times. I seriously wonder why it has become so popular. Well, most deal with userland anyway.
Wiger, drop me an email at asmodai(at)tendra.org if you want to test binaries and see how they work on your system, if you like. Same for other people who want to test UFS on Windows (2000, XP, 2003 at least).
I’m not too familiar with the BSD world, but I posted earlier about FFSdrv, which is based off of ext2fsd.
And again, for anybody who missed it, my project, ReiserDriver, for ReiserFS partitions.
http://rfsd.sf.net
Finally the ability to extend the windows operating system to do something useful, well maybe I wouldn’t go that far
I’ve been using the ext2 IFS driver for the better part of two months now. It’s been working great. Heck, I even serve HTTP and FTP via Roxen from an ext2 volume within Windows via this driver. At home, I have two identical WD 320GB SATA hard drives, one formatted as NTFS, the other as ext2. I the ext2 drive as a portable backup to the NTFS unit (very large software downloads archive, as well as an MP3 and video archive; easily 200+ GB). I don’t have the hard numbers right in front of me, but (in Windows) the NTFS claims to have much more free space that the ext2. The last time I looked, the NTFS volume was claiming several GBs more free space than the ext2.
I recently transitioned to WinXP x64 and am very dismayed that there is no 64-bit equivalent to ext2IFS.
As far as using NTFS within Linux, has anyone ever used Captive? It uses Windows DLLs to give full read-write access from within Linux. I haven’t fully used this capability.
-SUOrangeman @ Anandtech/2CPU
Simply, the subject explains itself.
—
Doca, Brazil
Properly better, ’cause it has some longer history and free as in GPL: http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/projects/projects.htm#ext2fsd.
Was working fine for me.
Wondering if ext2ifs is free of copyright violations.
Nice. Now I can scan ubuntu from winxp.
————————————–Scan started: Tue Aug 9 22:07:02 2005ERROR: Can’t open file C:Documents and Settings***** *****Local SettingsApplication DataMicrosoftInternet Explorerurlhist.mdbERROR: Can’t open file C:WINDOWSsystem32CatRoot2 mp.edbERROR: Can’t open file C:WINDOWSsystem32configdefaultERROR: Can’t open file C:WINDOWSsystem32configSAMERROR: Can’t open file C:WINDOWSsystem32configSECURITYERROR: Can’t open file C:WINDOWSsystem32configsoftwareERROR: Can’t open file C:WINDOWSsystem32configsystemERROR: Can’t access file D:ERROR: Can’t access file E:F:varlibclamav-getfileseicar.com: Eicar-Test-Signature FOUNDF:usrshareclamav-testfilesclam.cab: ClamAV-Test-File FOUNDF:usrshareclamav-testfilesclam.exe.bz2: ClamAV-Test-File FOUNDF:usrshareclamav-testfilesclam.exe: ClamAV-Test-File FOUNDF:usrshareclamav-testfilesclam.rar: ClamAV-Test-File FOUNDF:usrshareclamav-testfilesclam.zip: ClamAV-Test-File FOUND– summary –Known viruses: 38553Engine version: 0.86.2Scanned directories: 11290Scanned files: 102968Infected files: 6Data scanned: 7744.50 MBTime: 9151.066 sec (152 m 31 s)——————-Completed——————-
If that’s what IFS can do, then it is very poor.
The description of this driver implies that it is only useful to READ ext2/3fs partitions in VERY LIMITED cases.
It is unsuitable to write anything on these partitions, because it does not support MAJOR things like rights (so it writes files with which permissions ?), defragging (which basically means it will destroy your FS, especially ext3fs, as the defragging is actually part of how the FS writes files), and other things that sure are not minor ones.
And I say very limited cases, because, well, in 2005, you will see less and less non-UTF8 linux systems. Worse, we are not in 2000 anymore, some of us use LVM since a long time. Fact is this could not even read my LVM partitions (which are all of them, except / and /boot, which have no place to store anything useful and should not), and if it could, would bork my kanji-named and french-accentuated files.