Hi,

I have just installed SUSE Linux Profession 9.2 on my second hard drive, and have Windows XP SP2 on my first drive.

I have plans of making this a dual boot someday, but for now, I am wondering if there is like a add-on driver that gives support for Ext3 (ReiserFS) Linux partitions in windows explorer ???

Yeah, maybe a stupid question but would be kind of nice to be able to work with the Linux files in that partition in windows explorer like you do with normal windows file systems (FAT16/FAT32/NTFS etc).

I have seen some drivers/programs that allow you to view the partitions/folders and files in another explorer like app or a command line.

I have downloaded something called EXT2FSD, which does what I want, but it only works with Ext2 partitions. I tried loading the driver and mounting the Linux partition to a drive, but it doesn't work.

If anyone knows of anything else (even a read-only driver). let me know..

Thanks!

Andy

go to sourceforge and do a search, there are 4 tools there.

Obvious alternative is to copy files from within linux to the XP partition. And I know someone is going to say that linux doesn't support NTFS, but it DOES.

If you've installed Windows and Linux on the same machine, then it's already a dual boot machine...
Also, Linux does have READ support for NTFS, and technically write support too, but the write support can't make/delete anything, nor can it change the size of a file, or even move files around. It can only write to files without changing location or size. In effect, the write support is almost useless.

Another solution would be to use Captive NTFS, which actually is a sort of wrapper for the ntfs.sys file from Windows, but since you're using SP2 (I reccomend never installing SP2 for XP anyways), it won't work, and never will since it's no longer developed. It will only work up through SP1.

Thanks musicman_ace and Stormblazer for your information on this!

musicman_ace,

Yes, I can view my NTFS partitions with Linux, I can browse through all my NTFS partitions, but can't write to anything. As Stormblaze said, it does have write support, just kind of useless as your really limited of what you can do.

Stormblazer,

The reason that the dual boot wasn't already setup when I installed SUSE Linux is because, I disable my drive with Windows XP SP2 on it and a ton of other stuff I have kept and got over the years.

I didn't want to take the chance of overwriting any data/partitions on the drive because of a mistake I made on the installment since I haven't done anything with Linux before besides test out a beta version of FC2, So, I was just being safe.. :|

Anyway, I figure out how to change the configuration of SUSE boot loader. I set my Windows XP SP2 as the "default" OS at boot time and if I want, I can select Linux SUSE. So, all is good there.

Now for wanting to read/write Linux partition within Windows Explorer, I did get EXT2FSD Windows driver to work when I used Ext2 instead of ReiserFS as my Linux partition. (Yeah, probably not the best of ideas to "down grade" the file system just so I can view it in windows)

It is also read-only, it appears. All though, I thought it supported read/write. Unless there is some type of write protection set on the FS ???

I'll check out Captive NTFS and see if it will work, even though I have SP2, it doesn't hurt to try.

Thanks again,

Andy