How to convert mounted filesystem between codepages?

Question

I have an external drive formatted in ext3 (basically) that previously was connected to a Linksys NLSU2 NAS device. Now the NSLU2 is broken and I have struggled to restore the files on the disk because its filenames are using a Windows codepage (cp850). I can access the disk through a tool called "ext2fsd" in Windows where I have the option of choosing the proper codepage. However, my Windows computer is rather old and the ext2fsd tool is crashing from time to time.

When i try to mount the disk in Ubuntu I get broken filenames because the codepage is non-standard, I presume. Is it possible to:

1. Mount the drive in Ubuntu as ext3 with the codepage used on the disk?
2. Convert the codepage to a standard one suitable for ext3?

Answer 1

I'd try to fix the filenames with convmv - not sure if it's available for Windows, Ubuntu has it in repositories. This is a tool I've used for this exact use case. From its manual:

convmv is meant to help convert a single filename, a directory tree and the contained files or a whole filesystem into a different encoding. It just converts the filenames, not the content of the files. A special feature of convmv is that it also takes care of symlinks, also converts the symlink target pointer in case the symlink target is being converted, too.

All this comes in very handy when one wants to switch over from old 8-bit locales to UTF-8 locales. It is also possible to convert directories to UTF-8 which are already partly UTF-8 encoded. convmv is able to detect if certain files are UTF-8 encoded and will skip them by default. To turn this smartness off use the --nosmart switch.