HOWTO: Accessing your local Linux ext2/ext3 partitions from Windows XP
Purpose: Have you ever felt the pain of rebooting your dual-boot computer, having Linux and Windows XP install, back and forth to access/edit your data on your Linux partition? Yes, many of us have and it’s quite tedious. Accessing Windows partition from Linux is old school but there are very few utilities which would let you do the other way around – accessing Linux partitions from Windows XP. There is one such utility called Ext2 IFS for Windows, which allows you to access your ext2/ext3 partitions from Windows without having to reboot your system.
Example Scenario: I have a laptop with a single hard drive and I have Windows XP in one partition and Debian Linux in another.
Step 1: Download Ext2 IFS utility
From your Windows XP machine, download the utility (.exe file) from here. Keep on clicking next and say yes on check boxes like “Enable UTF-8 encoding” and “Enable the large file feature”. After that the setup will install the driver files and you will be greeted with the following screen:
EXT2FS
You basically have two options: Either you can manually assign the driver letters to your Linux partition (Z and Y in the above example) or you can click on the checkbox which says “Assign driver letter automatically…”. I decided to assign driver letters manually because I some networks drivers which are mapped as E,F,G, etc.
Z driver = Linux root partition
Y drive = Linux Swap partition
C = Windows XP partition (system)
D = Data partition (FAT 32)
Step 2: Go to My Computer
After finish the installation, go to “My Computer” and you should be able to see your additional new drive letters for your Linux partition as follow:
Step 3: Finish
Congratulations!!! Now you can just double click those driver letters (Z), as if they were Windows partition, and access data. You can read/write the partition (data) unless you selected to make the partition as “readable” during installation in step 1.
Enjoy accessing your local Ext2/Ex3 partitions in Windows XP without rebooting.
Additional Notes:
- Although the name of the utility has ext2 only in it’s name, it works fine perfectly with ext3.
- There might be other utilities on the Internet which would allow you to do that but I have found this to be the most reliable and it works great for me. In fact I did found a utility called Linux Reader and whenever I try to access my Linux partition from it, I get the BSOD in Windows XP when I close that utility. So use it at your own risk.
- One of the commenter mentioned about Ext2Fsd although I have not tried it.
As usual, please leave a comment/feedback if you have any. Comments encourages bloggers to post more and keep their spirits high.
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December 23rd, 2008 at 12:59 am
[...] HOWTO: Accessing your local Linux ext2/ext3 partitions from Windows XP [...]
December 25th, 2008 at 2:34 am
How about ext2fsd?
http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/projects/projects.htm#ext2fsd
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December 26th, 2008 at 4:46 am
Hi AC,
Thank you for your comment and for providing a link to new utility. I have not tried it yet. Have you tried it? What was your experience. I will try it on my 2nd computer.
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January 1st, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Firstly, I have to mention that I’m a novice class linux user.
And I tried ext2fsd to move JPG files from Linux box(Debian) to
Windows Xp with no problem. And moved a file (around 5 GB )
created with qemu-img.exe on Window Xp to linux box and the result
was fine. Then I moved a movie file ( about 1.2 GB) from Windows Xp
to a linux box and I could watch the movie on linux box. All via
a compact flash card (8 GB) on a usb card reader/writer.
But I must find a way to treat Japanese filename…..
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AC Reply:
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:28 am
Changeing the codepage from default to utf8 , I can cope with Japanese file names.
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Kushal Reply:
January 5th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Hi AC,
That’s great to know. I will try to quote your solution in my post as an update if that is fine with you.
Glad that it worked for you.
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AC Reply:
January 6th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
OK.
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Jason Reply:
September 20th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
AC,
Thanks for the tip–this saved my fiancee’s Korean mp3 collection and I am in your debt. Hit me up if you’re in LA!
JWSY
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March 12th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
[...] Suppose you have a hard drive on your computer which contains Windows XP and Linux on two separate partitions – The classic dual boot option. Now you would like to access your local Linux partition from your Windows XP machine so that you can easily read-write data on your Linux partition. To learn how to do that click here. [...]
March 15th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
This may not be revelant but i figured i’d post this anyway. If you’re using ubuntu 8.10 you may be in for some issues with the network manager. For some unknown reason it stops functioning. You will need to manually set you’re resolv.conf with your ISP’s DNS servers. That file is located in /etc/network/resolv.conf
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April 16th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Awesome post, i know ill need to be back soon
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May 18th, 2009 at 7:10 am
eh…. doesn’t work for me… It says that i have to format it when i click on the drive…. And i don’t want to do that……..
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Admin Reply:
May 18th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Hi,
Have you tried restarting Windows? Also how many Linux partition do you have including the Swap partition? Generally if you try to access the swap partition it will give you the “format” message – it does in mine too.
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October 27th, 2010 at 3:48 am
it also works with samba doesn`t it?
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