I dual boot WinXP and 5-6 Linux distros. Invariably, I am in WinXP and I want to look at a file on one of the Linux partitions. I have Paragon Partition Manager 7.0 installed in WinXP and I can browse the partitions, see all directories and files in the Linux partitions. But, I have no WinXP application that will view the file contents. Paragon makes the file available, but it depends on WinXP apps to view, edit, etc. the file contents.

Does anyone know of a simple file reader for WinXP that can view Linux files?

Thanks for any help, jimbo

If the file is available, you should be able to read any text/config file/script with Notepad (after all, they're all just text files). Just right click and "Open With..."

If you have tar or gz or tar.gz or bzip2 you might install 7-zip, which can decompress those formats.

You won't be able to read many binary files. Any other file depends on the filetype (i.e. openoffice document --> openoffice, etc)

try this:
www.fs-driver.org
I use it, and it allows you to mount, read, and write to EXT2 and EXT3 partitions, with large file (more than 2GB) support. I supports Win XP, but I'm not really sure about other Windows versions.
Still, this only let's you write to the EXT2/3 partition. Although, it would help if you specified what files you were trying to open.
And for compressed files, I reccomend ZipGenius ( zipgenius.it [it is in English]) and it can handle just about any compressed file you may have.

A few years ago, when I had win98, I bought a shareware app called winxs. It provided many common Linux command line utilities that I could use in win98, including a console window. So, I had cat, strings, diff, etc., available. I don't know if winxs is still available, nor do I know if its been upgraded to work with xp.

You might try googeling for it.

I tried to view a Grub menu.lst file in Wordpad. It opened OK, but all I saw was symbols typical of code. I guess menu.lst is not just a simple text file.

Thanks, jimbo

It should be just a text file. I don't know anything about Paragon Partition Manager, but try something else that you know is a text file. Maybe you need to try timothyb89's suggestion and get a file system plugin for XP to read ext3. Or you can try a different text editor like Notepad2 or Vim for Windows.

Now there's Cygwin. (It's like the complete opposite of WINE)
There's also a version with a X server and you can even get SSH. It's great for remote access...

Here is an update. I just want to view Linux text files from within WinXP. I just tried several to view several different files that I thought were text files; lilo.conf, fstab, menu.lst and grub.conf using WinXP Wordpad. I was able to view all files with no problem except for a Fedora Core 5 Grub menu.lst. Wouldn't you know the file I tried to read to check out Paragon's features was the only one that wouldn't work.

I can view Suse 10.1 grub menu.lst with no problems, but Fedora's menu.lst won't display.

Thanks, jimbo

Weird. What type of filesystem is the Fedora Core partition?

I've got Fedora Core, and I'm not even completely sure of what filesystem it uses...
Chances are, it uses EXT3, but reiserfs is getting more and more popular.

When I installed FC5, I specified ext3, but I think there has is some sort of file system problem with FC5. I also have Partition Magic on my WinXP. PM reports "unknown file type" when I try to access the FC5 partition. Paragon reports ext3 OK, and does provide access to the files. And there is a strange message that comes up during boot of the "master" Linux OS. When mounting local file systems, a message appears; "mounting /dev/hdxx failed, special device /dev/hdxx does not exist". Yet, after the system has finished booting /dev/hdxx is mounted just as expected from the /etc/fstab entry. I have reinstalled twice, with the same results, so I think there is some bug in FC5.

Thanks, jimbo

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