ext2 Windows Driver and Linux Software RAID happy together?
 

So I went ahead and did a software RAID 1 for my '/' and '/home' partitions. Now I want to read/write these partitions when I'm in Windows as well. So I went ahead and installed the ext2 windows driver from fs-driver.org
The question I have is, if I add some files to the /home partition while in Windows, will that change be written to both disks when I boot back into the Linux OS? Or would I just horribly break everything?

Thank you all for your help!

Are you even able to read from the RAID1 in Windows? You'd probably need something like VirtualVolumes.

Well that's the cool thing. If you use the ext2 Windows driver from the website below, your able to see both the Raid drives. For example if your Raid md0 is made from hda1 and hdb1, you'd be able to see both drives with separate drive letters in XP (i.e. Drives D: and E:)

I'm gonna guess that the answer to my question is no, but thought I'd ask anyway.

I hate to bring up an old post, especially as a new poster, but I ran into the same problem. The deal is, even though the drives do show up in the windows environment with the ex2 program, they show up as separate drives. This is probably because they are in a software raid on by the Linux OS. in XP, the separate drives show up, but windows does not see them as even being formatted. So its not such a cool thing that we see both drives in Windows.

Is there some way to have Linux continue to do its thing with the software raid, so that XP sees the RAID drive as a single drive rather than two unformatted drives, or is this only a pipe dream?

Is it possible perhaps to have both operating systems software RAIDing (by the way, is there a verb for this?) the drives with the ext2 format and to keep the data intact between OS's?

The only "safe" way to do this is to have true hardware raid. Nobody wants to do this because real true hardware raid cards start at about $300. The motherboard raids and the cheap raid cards are all fake raid or half software half hardware raid. The only way these work on both OSs (so both can play with the data) is if both software drivers handle everything EXACTLY the same. As the OSs are different on a very fundamental level, this is extremely difficult to do.

If you pile things like LVM on top of the raid, life just gets even harder.

Good Luck
Lazlow

mkay. Thanks a lot. Probably just get another drive and use it to transfer between the two OS's.

It can even just be a partition on any non raid drive.