Equal time for your Linux ReiserFS on Windows

[salvorhardin]

OK, I readily admit to be being a little slow on the uptake when it comes to finding these sorts of handy little utilities and will often spend weeks coding my own. However, while doing a little drive-by googling this afternoon I've discovered what, in my humble opinion, is just about the best thing since sliced bread.

For about a decade now us Linux users have gloated at our ability to read (and sometimes write) Microsoft file systems. This is, of course, just dandy when a friend brings over their MS-DOS or Windows formatted floppy or USB pen drive. We can easily read their files. It's also handy for those of us that maintain a dual-boot machine with both Windows and our favorite distro to be able to copy Windows files on over to our Linux partitions (whatever file system you might be using).

Back in the old FAT16 and FAT32 days we were even able to write to those same cludgy DOS and Windows partitions. However, with NTFS we weren't able to safely do that anymore because NTFS is, of course, proprietary and Microsoft isn't about to give any long-haired bearded hippy Free and Open Source freaks access to the source. We could still read just fine, but if we dared to write or delete from NTFS we risked a complete and thorough borking of our Windows partitions. CaptiveNTFS (lamentedly out of development) partially solved that problem by using Windows own DLL files to do this somewhat safely. Hopefully some day we'll have a viable and safe solution to this problem.

Meanwhile back on the dark side of the force we've had a serious problem. Our Linux partitions were completely invisible to Windows. Now, Gerson Kurz's wonderful little tool RFSTool has come to shine the revealing light of F/OSS goodness onto Windows. With the command line utility RFSTool, for those of us who have our Linux partitions formatted with ReiserFS it is now possible to at least read and copy data from our Linux partitions.

Simply download the Windows binary distribution from http://p-nand-q.com/e/reiserfs.html, and unzip it into whichever folder fits your fancy. Open up a command prompt, navigate to the folder you extracted RFSTool to and you're good to go.

Example:

rfstool ls -p0.2

will allow you to list the root directory of the ResiserFS filesystem on the first hard drive at partition 2.

But wait... there's more! What if, upon booting back into Windows, you find all your l33t command line 5ki11z sapped and you just want to click on pretty widgets all day? Well, Micahel Adams' RFSGUI, built on RFSTool will allow you to explore your ReiserFS partitions graphically to your heart's content. While the actual GUI part of RFSGUI is a bit primitive, in a Win 3.11 sort of way, it allows you to fully use RFSTool without ever resorting to a command prompt.

You can download RFSGUI from Michael's site here: http://www.wolfsheep.com/map

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Wow! I just felt movement in my nether regions!

I shall have to investigate this further and I am building a lot of dual-boot machines these days and I use reiser exclusively on the Linux side.

Many thanks!

[salvorhardin]

2. Heh -- I think I know that feeling.

:evilgrin: You're welcome.

The best thing about RFSTool and RFSGUI? Getting rid of that stupid FAT32 partition I've been using to have files available to both sides.

[cprise]

3. I wish there was ReiserFS for OSX

As it is, I have to use ext2 as a go-between with Linux.

Say.. When is Reiser4 going to be considered ready to eat?

[salvorhardin]

4. I think

about the same time the GNU/HURD hatchlings escape from the laboratory -- or Richard M. Stallman shaves his beard, dons a power suit and becomes a Wall Street stock broker. You know, that's the day Duke Nukem Forever is released. :-)