Explore FreeBSD filesystem under Windows?

[Brian Astill]

On Fri, 24 Dec 2004 06:02 am, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> > So ... if your flavour of Windoze can read FAT32, a FAT32 partition
> > is a very good idea because all the commonly-available unices can
> > read it as well.
> > If it can't ...  the options aren't so good.  I'd think ext2 would
> > be the only workable alternative to FAT16, but neither is
> > desirable.
> >
> > BTW, I haven't found one, but does anyone have a way to make WinNT
> > read FAT32?

Found that myself:
www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml
Which allowed me to download "fat32.exe" which allows NT 
to read/write but not create or format FAT32 partitions.  
Works OK.

> You know, every time I think I'm becoming too cynical about the
> Windows world, all I need to do is read a post like this, and remind
> myself that it is impossible to be /too/ cynical about Windows.

It gets worse.  I did some googling about VFAT and unices and found
 that it is a "feature" of VFAT that all files/directories are seen 
by unices as root-only access AND that this is immutable in situ. 

drwxr--r--   25 root     root        16384 Dec 31  1969 hdb5
drwxr--r--    9 root     root        16384 Jul 23 23:28 FreeBSD-docs
-rwxr--r--    1 root     root        71142 Jul 23 23:28 install-FreeBSD-notes

I CAN copy a file (as root) to my personal home directory and (as root)
chown and chmod there.  I can then deal with the file as I wish.  
However, saving to the VFAT directory can only be done as root
and the permissions then revert to " -rwxr--r- root root".
Not nice.

So it looks as though ext2 (using explore2fs from Windoze) is the only 
alternative to fat16.

-- 
Regards,
Brian
sos-sa.org.au