I have a situation where I need to read quite a bit of information from a ReiserFS disk under Windows XP, but so far I have only been able to find software based on rfstool.

This does allow me to see the contents of the disk, but unfortunately it doesn't seem like I can "mount" the ReiserFS partition through any of these tools. If I want to access the data from a Windows application, I need to first copy all of the data to the local drive. Given time and space constraints, I would really like to avoid this.

My alternative so far has been to share the ReiserFS drive out over SMB on one of my Linux machines, and then mount that in Windows. This works, but is obviously a bit slower than I would like.

Does anyone know of a way to make ReiserFS partitions viewable from within Windows applications? Or am I doomed to go about this in a roundabout way? It wouldn't be the end of the world, but before I begin the process I would like to know if there is a better way.

Unless someone comes up with a driver for windows to support ReiserFS, yes you're doomed.

I myself am wishing for the same thing in a Windows driver for JFS. When my notebook was alive, and I dual booted from Linux and Windows I kept an ext2 partition specifically for sharing between Windows and Linux. I could read/write to the ext2 partition in XP via a driver from fs-driver.org. Reason I chose ext2 was I needed large file support, and fat32 was useless for that. My other option was NTFS but I still don't trust NTFS-3G.

If it is feasible, copy whatever your have on the ReiserFS partition and format it as ext2. Thats one option.

AFAIK there's also total commander plugin (which hasn't been updated in last 5 years) for reading/writing resierfs, but that's about it. If you want something better, you could hire somebody to write a driver, but that'll take a lot of time and will be expensive.

It works, but you'll need to run chkdsk on ntfs partition from time to time - somehow ntfs-3g manages to accumulate small (security/permission -related?) errors over the time(at least thing worked this way last time I used it). I also heard once a story about the guy that supposedly killed his winodws vista partition using ntfs-3g, but that was few years ago and the only occurrence I ever heard of.