I do not know what the difference between ext2 and ext3. I noticed it while I was trying to partition my hard drive to install RedHat. Please advise.

ext3 is ext2 with the journalling

Are you pulling my leg. What in the heck is journalling.

he ext3 filesystem is a journaling extension to the standard ext2 filesystem on Linux. Journaling results in massively reduced time spent recovering a filesystem after a crash, and is therefore in high demand in environments where high availability is important, not only to improve recovery times on single machines but also to allow a crashed machine's filesystem to be recovered on another machine when we have a cluster of nodes with a shared disk.
Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
fire up google
type in : journaling ( on l please )
look down to the 4th or 5th item.
enjoy

A journal is a special part of a filesystem. Whenever something is to be written to a journaled filesystem, a note is written to the journal, the new info is written to the partition, and another note is written to the journal that the write was completed. This way, your system doesn't have to check the whole partition for errors after a crash. It can just look through the journal for entries that don't have a completed note.

How annoying is the disk check at start-up after a Windows crash? It would only take a few seconds if it had a journaled filesystem.

What your saying is ext2 is a filesystem that stores information such as a MBR does in Winfroze

Or maybe your saying ext2 contains the file structure of my files. Or does it contains my actual programs and file structure.

Please advise.

Or is it the same as the Windows Registry??????

ok, you do know about NTFS and FAT(32) partition types, correct?

the partition is a special section of the disk noted by a partition table (the table tells how the disk is sectioned off)

in order for info to be written to a partition, a file system needs to be created; a file system is a way that files, and directories are structured and written to the disk
NTFS, FAT32 in windows are the most common file systems; Ext2 and Ext3 are two file systems commonly used in linux

ext2 and ext3 are the same except for one main difference: Ext3, like said before, has a journaling capability which simply is a log-book for when something is being written to the disk, so when your computer shuts down illegally, the logbook contains the info necessary to quickly show what needs to be repaired (without haveing to look at the whole file system)

*edit: okay, the MBR contains info about How to use the harddrive to boot an operating system; windows does not reside in the MBR, it resides in its own file system (and partition) such as fat32 or ntfs; windows can put the NT bootloader in the MBR to tell your computer how to boot windows; linux can put lilo or grub in the MBR to tell how to boot the linux kernel and other operating systems (the OS does not run from the MBR)

Thanks oneandonly. Clears everything up. I had to create an extra partition for Ext and thats what threw me.