Ext3 instead of Ext4

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On 07-03-10 08:59, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 6 March 2010 18:02, MirJafar Ali<mirjafarali at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Hello
>>
>> I have installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my laptop and some experts suggested that I
>> should use
>> ext3 if I want to copy files from windows ( or other file systems ). I am
>> not sure, but respect
>> their advises.
>>
>> I couldn't notice if there is an option to select ext3/ext4 filesystem in
>> Ubuntu ?
>>
>> Can someone give right directions in this matter ? I immediate requirements
>> are to use
>> e2fsprogs which are filesystem utilties ?
>>
>
> Your ability to read / write files from Windows partitions (NTFS and
> FAT) depend on the NTFS and FAT drivers, not on you Linux file system.
> The only reason that I could fathom that they said that is because
> there is a Windows ext3 driver, so if you want to access the Linux
> partition from Windows you'd need ext3. However, the ext3 driver would
> probably work for reading from ext4 as well, as backward compatibility
> was a design goal. I wouldn't try writing, however, without some
> better advice.
>
>
I fear that my answer will be way over the head of the topicstarter, but 
just for sake of completeness: the current ext2/3 drivers for Windows 
doesn't support extents. These are a new feature in ext4. So you would 
be able to access an old converted ext2/3 to ext4 filesystem, but it 
wouldn't know how to handle an ext4 that was created from scratch.


That being said, what does the topic starter want to do? Mirjafar, what 
is your current situation and what is the goal that you want to achieve? 
To give you a good answer, you really need to provide more background 
information. All our answers are now just shooting in the dark, and that 
doesn't really help you.