Hi , I recently put Freespire on my second hard drive now windows doesn't recognize it . It shows up under disk management as a unnamed drive and "healthy and active "  any ideas on what is wrong ?   Thanks

-whippy (March 26, 2008, 03:36 AM)

Windows can't read ext*/reiserfs/whatever other file system your Linux installation is using. Windows will only recognize NTFS and FAT file systems, nothing else. There's not really anything you can do about it. I know there is a driver out there somewhere that lets Windows read Ext2/3 but it was so unreliable and caused so many BSOD's for me that I wouldn't bother looking it up. On the positive side though, *nix can both read and write NTFS using NTFS-3g (now used by default in most distros).

EDIT: I almost forgot, if you are using Total Commander on Windows, you can use this FS plugin to gain read access to Ext*/ReiserFS partitions. It's not 100% perfect, but it will let you read almost anything on said file systems.

-Dirhael (March 26, 2008, 08:24 AM)

Ok so how should I have done it ? Do I have to reformat the linux hard drive ?

-whippy (March 27, 2008, 02:51 AM)

You haven't done anything wrong, it's just the way it works. Microsoft have their own file systems and Apple & *nix have others. Sure you can reformat your HDD if you want to access it from Windows again, but that means removing Linux. Technically it is possible to install Linux on an NTFS drive using the NTFS-3g driver but performance will suffer, you'll lose some rather important features that is very likely to stop your Linux installation from working as intended and I don't think you will find many (any?) distros that will set that up for you automatically in any case.

From benchmarks, NTFS-3g performance seems abysmal, though... and how full is it's support? Does it support $BadClus, for instance? Does it journal it's operations, and does it support journal playback?

Too bad that nobody wrote proper ext*, xfs and reiserfs drivers for windows, it would be interesting to compare those filesystems against native NTFS performance.

-f0dder (March 26, 2008, 08:33 AM)

I don't know how "full" the support is, but from my experience in just using it I have yet to encounter a single problem with corrupted files etc. Performance have also generally been quite good (certainly not abysmal) and have improved a lot since I first tested it back when it was brand new, even if it's not *as* fast as ext3 and friends. I wouldn't use it as my root filesystem (you can do so but...why?), but it's perfect for sharing files between the OS's when dual booting :)

Ahh, so you need a key to the code? As I posted previously, I have SP3 v.3311 and that's the code for RC2. How will I know when I get RC3?
I was expecting a notation in the properties sheet that SP3, RC2, v.3311, or something similar, had been installed. Not being privy to the coding system used I had hoped that SP3 was installed and I was done with it. Too much to hope for I guess!

 :(

-Cuffy (March 07, 2008, 12:13 PM)

That I can understand, but the thing is that the service pack did not show up on Windows Update by itself. You had to actively seek it out and when doing so, it would have been a good idea to read what the website you (should) have gotten it from said. I mean, the download page on Microsoft's site repeatedly refers to it as "Windows XP SP3 RC2." Even the file you downloaded has "Release Candidate 2" in the filename (the standalone installers does not, but even so the page is still plastered with information on what it is you are about to download) ;)

In any case, I don't think there will be any more release candidates of SP3. Should there be one however you would know that you got it because just like in the past, you would have to actively seek it out.