Vlogcanic

Typical nuisance: your machine has Windows XP and a Linux distro sharing a hard drive with dual boot. Whenever you are using your Linux system (say, Ubuntu 7.04 or something alike) your NTFS partitions get mounted automatically without any hassle (unless you left them hibernating) BUT the day you are working (or trying to work) in Windows and need some file from your Linux filesystem you either have to reboot or have had to copy that file to an USB pendrive or the NTFS partition beforehand.

There are tools that allow your Windows to read ext2 and ext3 partitions out there (if, on the other hand, you have SuSE or used ReiserFS, or any other file system… you’ll need to wait for another post) with varying degrees of functionality.

The one tool I can recommend to suit your ext2/ext3 partition reading from Windows is Explore2fs because of the very simple reason that is the one free program that actually worked in my computers. It’s free, very small in size, simple, efficient, it has a GUI, needs no installation and it does the trick.

There are a couple of catches, of course. Explore2fs does not integrate into Windows Explorer (which means you won’t see your ext3 partition by clicking in “My Computer”) and any file you want to retrieve must be imported into the NTFS partition (no previews, thumbnails, direct access and things of the sort).

In  order to get Explore2fs all you need click in the official website link and download a binary version for Windows ( explore2fs-1.08beta9.zip is the one I’m using). Unzip the file, and double-click on the Tux icon in order to get it started.

It’s that simple.