Re: XFS

["Geir A. Myrestrand" <geir.myrestrand@falconstor.com>]

Jaideep Nandy wrote:
> Usb drive. I used a tera station to format it with XFS and backed up
> file onto it. 
> Now I want to use the drive on a regular win xp box with ntfs partition.

Windows [XP] have no knowledge of XFS, nor have I ever heard of any 
applications running natively on Windows [XP] that can read XFS file 
systems. Your best bet is to use a Linux distro to read it.

You can make your PC multi-boot, so that you either start up in Windows 
XP or in Linux/UNIX.

You can also use a program like VMware Workstation or VMware Player 
(both are free) to install Linux in a virtual machine under Windows 
--then you can run both at the same time.

If you do not want to install anything, then get a Linux live distro and 
boot from that. A live distro is a special DVD (or CD) that will let you 
run the OS directly from the optical disc, with no need to install 
anything on the local disk. You may need a USB drive or something like 
that to save configuration files, etc.

Not all Linux distributions support XFS, but any version of SUSE Linux 
should serve the purpose. OpenSUSE 10.2 was just released and should do 
the job --see http://www.opensuse.org.

Once you get access to the XFS file system from Linux on your PC, then 
you can copy it to a FAT partition, because both Windows and Linux 
support that. Or you can access your NTFS partition from Linux (if you 
dare) --see http://www.linux-ntfs.org.

I'm assuming that the USB drive is independent of the Tera Station, if 
not then you can simply utilize the NAS feature of the Tera Station and 
map to the share from Windows XP. Also, if you do not have the Tera 
Station but have a Linux computer, then you could use Samba (see 
http://www.samba.org) to share out the USB disk and you could map to it 
from your Windows XP box.

With a closed source OS it isn't trivial for anyone to provide you with 
direct support for a third party file system, it will be merely 
workarounds for deficiencies in the OS.

I recommend you ditch your OS but keep your USB disk with XFS. ;-)


-- 

Geir A. Myrestrand