Question for Dann regarding Ext3 and OS X

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 3:53 am

I've been considering getting an Intel iBook when they come out, and I know you own atleast a couple Macs, including a Powerbook. I was wondering if it's possible to read and write to an external hard drive formatted as Ext3 from within OS X. Ideally, I'd like to dual-boot Linux and OS X on the iBook, but if I can't access my data on the externel drive there's not much point in getting a Mac.

Update*

I found this, but it doesn't appear to support Tiger. Damnit.

Post by **dann** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 10:24 am

This should get you going: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ . I used it to access my ext3 partitions. But then I went and made my home partition Reiserfs, and there is no support for that under OS X yet.

Becareful with this utility, though. I would not suggest having the partition automount whenever you log in to OS X. I did this for a while and when I had a lockup on OS X that required a hard reset it did some funky thing to the partition and caused problems booting OS X. The partition would not mount and this prevented OS X from booting. I had to boot Linux for it to run the disk check on the partition and then all was ok.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 4:01 pm

Does this work with the latest OS X? Someone said that it only works with 10.2 and 10.3.