I'm guessing that this project is no longer under developement since there hasnt been any updates to it in over a year but I would really like to see support for this project under a Mac running Intel CPUs. My last PPC Mac has kicked the bucket and this tool was VERY helpful to me since I use many different platforms and I am often reading hard drives using USB to IDE/SATA adaptors.
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I'm wondering about the development of this, too, though it does actually support Intel macs, at least the 1.4d4 version does. The problem is it's not reliable - crashes with kernel panics and so on, now and then. In particular, for me, deleting or renaming things on an ext2 partition is pretty reliably instant-death territory, and occasionally it carks on mount, too. The crash on mount seems to be related to file name length, I suspect OS X tries to make some long-named temp file or directory sometimes - OS X supports file names up to 255 UTF-8 characters long and (this?) ext2 seems only to support 255 byte names. The delete/rename thing seems to be related to the block mapping mechanism, where cached blocks are signified by negative numbers yet some or other routine gets a negative block number and throws a kernel panic on account of it, which is presumably just an oversight somewhere where the block mapping thing is omitted, or something. I haven't studied the code in depth.
Annoyingly, once it's crashed and left the file system unclean, the supplied e2fsck seems to fail to mark it clean again after a fsck and the only way to get it to remount on the mac at all is to fsck it on a linux box. Since the drive I most want this for is 400G and not too quick, it's somewhat vexing to have to fsck it every time the ext2fs driver falls over.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful for a free ext2 driver, and motivated enough by the niggling fscking problems to put some work into it myself, since I think a free, reliable ext2/ext3 driver is a major omission with OS X. (why do Apple not provide this as standard, and what's with the "apple UFS" nonsense? They support Windows file systems, after all. Daft!)
However, I've only just started looking at it and having grabbed the dev tree from CVS, as it stands it won't build for me - loads of debug stuff in the fancy control panel bit, which I'm not really that interested in in any case. Some guidance from the author would be handy, but I guess if he had time to explain where to look for issues, he'd probably have time to fix them, so I haven't hassled him about it. It'd be nice if we had some community effort on this, though - I can't believe there aren't more Linux/OS X dual-booters out there with a keen interest in making this work reliably, or is there some newer, shinier implementation which I'm missing?
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Actually, I'd be very interesting in working with someone to make this driver finally work without any problem on tiger.
It used to be really usefull on panther (and that's why I upgraded to tiger only a few months ago) but now, it sucks and I so need it.
3 options :
a) either we start digging on the actual code to make it work
b) either we start porting ext3 to macfuse (wich I think already exists for linux or bsd)
c) we all put 10 $ to the donation to the author to help him correct the bug and maybe we should ask him how much he would need to finish the work ?
I think b would be easier if a bsd port of fuse and ext3 exists and if the author has no interest/time to deal with it.
to contact me please
use this email adress (you must read it from right to left) and please put [ext2 osX] on the subject
r f . e e r f @ h a d d e s . e m a j d
I hope some people will see this cast away
Djamé
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I do support the idea of finding a solution for a better support for ext3 in Os X. I came from a linux world, which I still use intensively and I need to share files between mac and Linux. I haven't been able to mount the ext3 partitions from the usb disk I have. formating in fat32 is not a solution as it loose information and change the case of the filenames.
Manuel
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I'm guessing that this project is no longer under developement since there hasnt been any updates to it in over a year but I would really like to see support for this project under a Mac running Intel CPUs. My last PPC Mac has kicked the bucket and this tool was VERY helpful to me since I use many different platforms and I am often reading hard drives using USB to IDE/SATA adaptors.
I'm wondering about the development of this, too, though it does actually support Intel macs, at least the 1.4d4 version does. The problem is it's not reliable - crashes with kernel panics and so on, now and then. In particular, for me, deleting or renaming things on an ext2 partition is pretty reliably instant-death territory, and occasionally it carks on mount, too. The crash on mount seems to be related to file name length, I suspect OS X tries to make some long-named temp file or directory sometimes - OS X supports file names up to 255 UTF-8 characters long and (this?) ext2 seems only to support 255 byte names. The delete/rename thing seems to be related to the block mapping mechanism, where cached blocks are signified by negative numbers yet some or other routine gets a negative block number and throws a kernel panic on account of it, which is presumably just an oversight somewhere where the block mapping thing is omitted, or something. I haven't studied the code in depth.
Annoyingly, once it's crashed and left the file system unclean, the supplied e2fsck seems to fail to mark it clean again after a fsck and the only way to get it to remount on the mac at all is to fsck it on a linux box. Since the drive I most want this for is 400G and not too quick, it's somewhat vexing to have to fsck it every time the ext2fs driver falls over.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful for a free ext2 driver, and motivated enough by the niggling fscking problems to put some work into it myself, since I think a free, reliable ext2/ext3 driver is a major omission with OS X. (why do Apple not provide this as standard, and what's with the "apple UFS" nonsense? They support Windows file systems, after all. Daft!)
However, I've only just started looking at it and having grabbed the dev tree from CVS, as it stands it won't build for me - loads of debug stuff in the fancy control panel bit, which I'm not really that interested in in any case. Some guidance from the author would be handy, but I guess if he had time to explain where to look for issues, he'd probably have time to fix them, so I haven't hassled him about it. It'd be nice if we had some community effort on this, though - I can't believe there aren't more Linux/OS X dual-booters out there with a keen interest in making this work reliably, or is there some newer, shinier implementation which I'm missing?
Anyone know if latest 1.4d4 works under iMac with Leopard?
Actually, I'd be very interesting in working with someone to make this driver finally work without any problem on tiger.
It used to be really usefull on panther (and that's why I upgraded to tiger only a few months ago) but now, it sucks and I so need it.
3 options :
a) either we start digging on the actual code to make it work
b) either we start porting ext3 to macfuse (wich I think already exists for linux or bsd)
c) we all put 10 $ to the donation to the author to help him correct the bug and maybe we should ask him how much he would need to finish the work ?
I think b would be easier if a bsd port of fuse and ext3 exists and if the author has no interest/time to deal with it.
to contact me please
use this email adress (you must read it from right to left) and please put [ext2 osX] on the subject
r f . e e r f @ h a d d e s . e m a j d
I hope some people will see this cast away
Djamé
I do support the idea of finding a solution for a better support for ext3 in Os X. I came from a linux world, which I still use intensively and I need to share files between mac and Linux. I haven't been able to mount the ext3 partitions from the usb disk I have. formating in fat32 is not a solution as it loose information and change the case of the filenames.
Manuel
I'd love intel mac support as well.