okay, since I struggled with this for a bit (and because I’m a warm hearted individual that wants everyone to be happy) here’s the gist of it:
you’ll want to download ext2fsx from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ make sure you download the latest development version (as of the date of this post: 1.4d4).
Install, reboot, after you are done you might notice that when you plugin your drive, it doesn’t mount automagically, even if you go to system settings where ExtFSManager lives and try to mount it there it could very well fail (especially if your drive wasn’t cleanly umounted the last time). So here’s what I did:
Open a terminal and fsck your harddrive (if you want to wild guess where it is osx in a very friendly way links the proper device to /dev/drive0,1, and so forth). This step is only required of course if you have the unclean umount issue.
Create a directory under /Volumes to mount your drive and then mount the drive with something like
sudo mount_ext2 -o rdonly -x /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/linux
Now it could be that the device still doesn’t show on the desktop, under Finder just click on “Go” and then “go to folder” and type in the mount point of your drive (that would be that last part of the mount command).
et voilá. it’s on your desktop.
Should be easier? Yep, damn straight it should, and apple should really get the ext2/3 fs by default out of the box.
1 ResponsesLeave a comment ?
THANK YOU! A great hint, that worked fine for me right away, just as you discribed mounting using the ExtFSManager through system settings did not work, however the command line did the trick. I used a slightly different command, since your version did not work for me, but that might be a configuration issue? The command line I used was “mount -t ext2 -o rdonly /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/linux”. Thus I was able to copy files from an external disk with ext3 filesystem to the os x machine.