The Changeover, Part 2 - Forcing it to work, and why that's a bad idea

As you may recall from last time, I was attempting to make Windows 7 read my ext3 drive. After much finagling, using bcdedit to turn on test mode to allow ext2fsd's unsigned drivers to install without Windows deleting them, I managed to get Win7 to read my ext3 drive. A miracle, right? Everybody said it couldn't be done, but here I was having done it. Well, it's not as cut and dry as that, unfortunately. Upon first glance, there were minor latency issues. Browsing the drive took just a little bit longer than it did to browse the various ntfs drives on the system. Dismissing this as negligible, I proceeded to set up streaming to my 360. At first, I decided to try out the Media Center Extender. This didn't work at all. As soon as I got past the "enter this pin into Media Center" the whole thing crashed. No big deal, I would just use Media Player 12, right? Wrong. WMP12 decided to only scan the watch folders it liked, and very few of those were on the ext3 drive. So, as anybody would do, I moved onto Plan C. This involved mapping the drive in the linux machine (which has no SATA ports, or this would all be moot), and sharing to the 360 through that. Once that was set up, it looked good... for about three seconds. Then the Win7 box BSoD'd to death. I had to test this a few more times to be sure, but basically any time an external program attempted to access the ext3 drive, the whole computer crapped itself.

My next attempt was to use colinux or andlinux to run as a Windows process, map the drive, then share it using Samba. This came to a quick halt as neither programs support x64 processors.

So, it seems that my adventures with ext3 in Win7 have come to a stopping point. There are no other viable options for making this work short of buying a SATA card for the Linux box. That's exactly what I have since done. Once said card arrives I will be moving said hard drive over and I can put this whole ordeal behind me. Still, it saddens me that this didn't work out, as for a while there when things were working and hadn't started crashing yet, I was sort of proud what many people (a few who had worked for Microsoft) said was impossible. I guess they were right in a way, at least until somebody out there throws together a stable driver.

As a final note, none of this would even have been necessary if Microsoft would support alternate file systems!

That is all.