I just want to give credits to the people at http://www.fs-driver.org for creating an incredible little tool that has saved my day a couple of times. They have produced a fully functional and stable way to access Ext3-formatted disks under Windows.

Now you might ask, what is Ext3? It is a file system, a way to arrange all those files and folders on a hard drive, CD-rom or USB memory drive. Ext3 is a very versalite and safe file system, even though there are other more specialized alternatives that perform faster in some areas. You could say that Ext3 has become the industry standard file system for Linux systems all over the world.
The Windows counterpart of Ext3 is called NTFS, and is a proprietary system developed by Microsoft, which means that it still is difficult to fully use NTFS disks under Linux and other free systems. File systems are extremely complicated, and without proper specifications it is difficult to decipher the inner workings of the file system. Full NTFS support under Linux is coming closer every day, but even if full support is announced, it remains a proprietary Microsoft system and should be avoided.

To share data between Linux and Windows used to be quirky, leaving the obselote FAT32 file system as the only file system supported fully by both Linux and Windows. Until Windows got support for Ext3!

I tried it out on my 80GB USB hard drive, plugged it in to a Windows box and installed the driver. Suddenly a new disk drive popped up in Explorer, and I could read and write to all my files. Wonderful! This meant that I finally can use a real file system for all my storage needs. Thumbs up!

Tip: Create a small partition on you USB drive formatted with FAT32 that only contains the installation file for the Ext3 driver. This means that you can bring your disk to any Windows computer, install the driver from the mini-partition, and then take advantage of all the features of a real file system!