Ghosty’s weblog

Accessing your Reiserfs, XFS, lvm, dm-raid, … partitions under Windows

From time to time I also boot Windows which is still installed on a partition on my desktop. The Microsoft operating system does not have support for any Filesystems that are nowadays mainstream on Linux. I know you can access Ext2/3 with ext2 installable file system for windows but that does not help to access my XFS homedirectory on my desktop. As a workaround I was thinking to try and mount them with VMware running linux but since this did not seem to work a friend gave me the tip to try coLinux and this seems to be pretty easy:

• install coLinux (see the wiki and docu) and make sure it can access the network
• add in the config file for colinux a line:

cobd2=”\Device\Harddiskx\Partitionx”
with x the harddisk number and y the partition number (both start from 0, just count the partitions, needs some experimentation perhaps …)

• under the linux image you can just mount it by

mount -t xfs /dev/cobd2 /mnt/mountpoint
and after that add it to your fstab file.

• share /mnt/mountpoint using samba (see plenty of howto’s if you don’t know how to do this)
• Now you can access your linux partitions through the colinux samba share