Successful reading of ext2/3 from WinXP

I bought a 750GB LaCiE USB2 external drive and wanted to copy DVB MPEG files onto it to watch via a WinXP laptop while away at a conference. It's been a while since I last tried to share files between WinXP and Linux; since then big disks and big files are common place.

The drive came preformatted as NTFS. I managed to get Linux to mount it via ntfs-3g and the old ntfs modules, but it was unstable, and obviously still isn't ready for write access.

My second idea was to use FAT32 (vfat module) as most USB keys use that and I'd successfully used it on my LaCiE 2.5" 120GB USB2 disk. Unfortunately most of the MPEG files are bigger than 4 GB, which is beyond the capability of FAT32. Back to the drawing board.

So I googled for "winxp ext2" and found the following:

http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html
It provides Windows NT4.0/2000/XP/2003/Vista with full access to Linux Ext2 volumes (read access and write access). This may be useful if you have installed both Windows and Linux as a dual boot environment on your computer. The "Ext2 Installable File System for Windows" software is freeware.

It sounded great, and to my surprise, it lived up to its claims! I did a "mke2fs" on the USB2 disk, and copied some files across, ranging from 400MB to 8GB. I then plugged it into the WinXP laptop and it found it, let me (permanently) assign it drive L:. I opened Windows Media Player Classic, and it played it all without issue - no lag, no problem going past 4 GB. I was very impressed.

So two thumbs up from me for Ext2 IFS!