I have a machine which dual boots Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.04 from two separate hard drives.

On the same hard drive as Ubuntu I also have an Ext3 partition with music files on it.

I use a couple of other Linux computers on the network as well, and like to access the music files on the Ext3 partition over the network. Easy via an NFS share when the dual boot machine is logged into Ubuntu.

However, over the coming months the dual boot machine is going to be logged into Windows most of the time, and want to know the best way of continuing to access the music files over the network - remember they're on a separate drive from Windows.

I've tried one method which didn't seem too successful. I used Ext2IFS in Windows to access the Ext3 partition, and then set up a Windows share but found I could only see some of the files from the remote Linux machines (mounting the share with mount.cifs).

Do a google search for ext2/3 drivers for Windows. They exist, I have them currently. I believe it's an .exe file that runs from where ever it is and allows you to see, read and write to ext2/3 file systems.

Its called EXT2IFS

I use it on XP x64 and Vista x86

http://www.fs-driver.org/download.html

I'm already using EXT2IFS and it's working fine on the Windows machine. My question is about how to access the Ext3 partitions on the Windows machine from other machines running Linux.

Are you talking about on a LAN? Or do you want to be able to remote in from another Linux box (via vnc, ssh or otherwise)? I've never tried that before, you should just be able to share it like any other drive and make it available to the network. However, I can't vouch for the stability or functionality of something like that.

Regards

It's a LAN. Basically what I've tried is this:

On the machine running Windows I've used Ext2IFS to see the Ext3 drive on the machine's other hard drive, and I've assigned the drive to, for example, Drive F. All works fine on that machine - I can see everything in the Ext3 drive from Windows.

I then set up a Windows network share for Drive F, sharing it as, for example, "ext3drive".

From another Linux machine on the LAN I can access the Windows share with this command:

mount.cifs //IP-OF-WINDOWS-MACHINE/ext3drive /mnt/other -o guest

It all seems to work OK, but in some of the subdirectories in the Windows share, I don't see all the files that are there e.g. in one directory there are 59 files, but I only see 29 of them.

So is there an easier/better way of doing what I want here? Or have I just done something wrong?

Make sure particular files aren't hidden or unshared. Something tells me if you aren't seeing everything, it might be a problem with the driver itself. Maybe check out the site that Carl posted and see if there any known bugs. It might be under that.

It sounds like a windows share permission problem

so you have the EXT3 partition on a Windows XP Machine?
Lets assume you mounted this EXT3 Physical Hard Drve to X: Drive using Ext2IFS

you then shared X: Driver using windows File Shaing as 'Music' Share.

Is this correct?

If so this is what i do and it works correctly

Do other Windows Shares work correctly?

Samba as far as i am aware is not case sensitive and support less file characters than Linux (& * ! ? etc)
If a song contains anyof these Samba server on windows may stop listing files to the client (aka missing some files)


PS this is all really awkward way of doing it, Windows Frags the hell out of all drives and more over Windows cannot Defrag or do maintenance like fsck/scandisk on EXT3 volumes.

carl0ski, that is exactly what I'm doing yes.

I even re-set it all this morning i.e. took off the Windows shares, rebooted Windows, re-established the Windows shares and tried again. Same result from the Linux machines - I can only see roughly half of the files in each sub-directory of the Windows share.

So far I cannot identify any distinguishing features for the files I can't see - it seems to be random, the file names do not contain any of the characters you mentioned, and the file permissions give no clue either.

Could it be there's a size limit i.e. somehow data beyond xxMb in a subdirectory will not be seen?

Since it works for you though, I'm going to keep looking. I bet there's something I've missed somewhere.

I realise this is an awkward way of doing things. I would be happy with just read-only access to these files from Linux, provided I could see all of them!

I've now checked the file names for characters which Windows doesn't support - there aren't any.

A friend of mine suggested Windows might fail to share file names which are beyond a certain length, but it had successfully shared the file with the longest name that I have, so it's not that.

I changed the name of one of the files that wasn't being shared to something really short (5 characters) and Windows still failed to share it.

None of the files is hidden - at least they were not originally saved with names beginning with a ".", unless there's another kind of hidden file I don't know about.

But the weird thing is, when I'm on one of the other Linux machines I can play the music files - *even the ones that don't show up in directory listings* by typing in the correct file name. So I guess Windows has shared them in some sense.

I think all I can do is try one of the other Ext2 Windows drivers and see if I get a better result.

hay themeone ....

did you get your solution. i want to know what was the solution plz let me know.
i also think the problem was with the software Ext2IFS.