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Re: Mounting ext2fs filesystem??


On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc) wrote:

> At 10:52 AM 1/30/2001, Mark Paulus wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >I have a dual boot win2K with cygwin, and debian 2.2 system.
> >I have win2K on hda exclusively, and debian on hdb 
> >exclusively.  Mounting my FAT/NTFS partitions is no problem
> >under debian, but I was wondering if it is possible to mount my
> >ext2fs partition under cygwin?
> >
> >Thanks.
> 
> 
> Actually, this would be off-topic for this list.  As Chris points out,
> Cygwin doesn't encompass things as device drivers, etc.  That said, you
> might want to do a search on explore2fs and/or ext2nt.  These address, in 
> different ways, your query.
> 

Weeeelllll, it would be *possible* -- just not very efficient (read: dog
slow) to implement a new mounting type within cygwin:  mount
//./physicaldevice0 /usr/local/ext2 -t ext2 -o partition3

However, this is ALOT of work.  And would be DOG DOG slow.  And very
dangerous (file system corruption)  You'd have to refer to the entire
drive as a raw device (*), parse the partition table yourself, seek to the
specified partition, and THEN you could kick in your custom ext2
code.   Since cygwin uses windows read calls to open files, you'd have to
rewrite a lot of the core cygwin code to use custom file access routines
-- for all file accesses, not just ext2 ones.  That would slow everything
down to a crawl.

Oh yeah -- right now, mount doesn't understand -t or -o style options.  So
you've got to fix that.

(*) AFAIR, windows will not let you refer to a partition in raw mode,
unless it understands the format (e.g. //./C: is obviously formatted using
a type that windows understands, because it assigned a drive letter to
it!)

In summary, I think it would be possible -- but very very difficult and
the downsides, even if successful, outweigh the upsides. You'd be better
off using ext2nt or somesuch so that *windows* will understand the
partition type, and then the cygwin stuff could access it 
"transparently".  (Explore2fs won't help because it only works within its
custom browser.)

--Chuck



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