1 Sept 2006

Windows filesystems better than Linux!


Yes, according to me, Windows filesystems are better than Linux!! I made a bad experience a while ago when my Linux box crashed.

As I stated earlier, I cannot boot on Linux. However, I would greatly want to recover some data found on that partition. So I downloaded a small application called Ext2 IFS. This application is just great since it mounts the filesystems that are used in Linux under Windows. Like this, I get new drives when I click on My Computer in Windows. Then, I am able to read or write to EXT2/EXT3 filesystems!

So far, so good. However, here's my bad experience. Since my Linux OS crashed,
EXT2 IFS could not access the EXT3 partition! In fact, EXT2 IFS gave me the error message "The disk in drive X is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?". When I looked up what caused this on its website, I found out that I could diagnosis this issue by downloading and running another program called moundiag.exe. When I ran it, I got another error saying that my EXT3 filesystem has some flag set that EXT2 IFS does not yet implement, and that there are some transactions left in the journal. However, if the Linux OS had shutdown properly, I wouldn't have such problems.

So, my only hope is to re-install a Linux OS without deleting my data.

As such, the EXT2/EXT3 filesystems are not as "recoverable" as that of FAT, FAT32 and NTFS that are used in Windows. Whenever the Windows OS crashes, files on the partition may still be recovered by mounting the drive in Linux or mounting the hard disk on another computer.

So Linux users, beware! Don't let your Linux OS crash!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Use a linux live cd and mount the filesystem from there. You will then be able to fsck the filesystem.

Dilraj said...

OK thanks a lot. I will do it when I get a live cd.