ext2 support for Windoz

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> Thanks Tony and Mark. 
> In this specific case, one of my neighbors who is a windows person
> bought a Buffalo Linkstation. This is a linux box.
> http://www.buffalotech.com/wireless
> 
> He also bought a USB drive to use as a backup device. The question he
> specifically asked was that if he had to get data out of the USB hard
> drive, how to do it from Windows. At this time, I know that the USB hard
> drive is formatted with a Linux file system, but Harvey was unable to
> determine what filesystem, and I am assuming EXT2/3. I am also burning a
> Knoppix 3.4 CD for him. (He's a bit gunshy because he recently lost a
> hard drive and its data). 
> 
> Additionally, the Buffalo device also serves as a print server. 
> 
> BTW: The buffalo device has a web interface, but it apparently has
> telnet and ssh blocked, to make it more difficult to hack into. 

The first step would be to find out what type of filesystem it is. That 
should be simple enough; connect it to a Linux box and try to mount it. 
Most of the time, mount will automagically figure it out. Most USB flash 
drives use FAT16 file systems (the Win95, etc long filename extensions 
-- VFAT in Linux-speak -- work too); that's how they come from the 
factory, so unless Buffalo reformats it, that will be what is there.

Once you know what kind of filesystem is there, you can use an appropriate 
program on Windows to open it (if one exists). People on the list have 
already mentioned programs for ext2 filesystems; those will also work for 
ext3, but writing to the filesystem will make the journal invalid. For 
reiserfs, there are rfstool (http://p-nand-q.com/download/rfstool.html) 
and YAReG (http://yareg.akucom.de/); they are read-only tools.

The filesystem may not be the only issue, though. Even if you get the 
files themselves off the Buffalo device, they may not be in a form that is 
readily usable by anything else.