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Is there anything that will natively allow read/write on an ext2/3 partition within Snowie?

Just don't want to get a Linux box to mount, and then access via samba. Although I could perhaps through VMware Fusion … and then share it back…

Anyway to do this natively?

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4 Answers 4

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MacFUSE OSXFuse plus fuse-ext2

Note: fuse-ext2 was previously hosted at http://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-ext2/.

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  • 1
    MacFuse is no longer maintained
    – olafure
    Mar 29, 2012 at 12:44
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    OSXFuse is a proper FUSE library, unlike MacFuse, and it is not only maintained, but it also provides a MacFUSE compatibility layer osxfuse.github.com Jan 15, 2013 at 3:37
  • fuse-ext2 link is broken. You can find it here.
    – Alain
    May 22, 2013 at 9:28
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    Just for information: I've installed both OSXFuse and Fuse-Ext2 on Mavericks, and there's no need to use the Terminal to mount the Ext2 disk... it is automatically recognized and mounted
    – Barranka
    Nov 8, 2013 at 18:05
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    Works well for me. One caveat: Remember to install the MacFUSE compatibility layer in OSXFuse, otherwise the shared library that fuse-ext2 uses will not be present => it won't work. Jul 12, 2014 at 20:46
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I find the easiest and most reliable way to access linux ext3 partitions on my mac is to run Ubuntu in a vmware virtual machine on the mac. Once running you can connect Ubuntu to the ext3 drive via usb, and this way you can get complete reliability reading and writing to ext3 file systems. It's fast because the disk is directly connected to the mac, unlike on a network. And you can use it to copy files very quickly to/from the mac host by using shared directories or any number of other ways.

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  • Of course, this presumes that the partition is on an external USB drive though... Jul 12, 2014 at 20:47
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You could also install either e2fsprogs or ext2fuse with macports.


Don't think any mount commands are included with port's e2fsprogs. (Though there's fsck and the like.) But installing ext2fuse does do the trick!

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fuse-ext2 works but is very slow (I get some 7 MB/s reading and 1 MB/s writing via USB 2.0).
If you have the choice, better use Apple's HFS+ on the external drive, which is much faster
(I get some 30 MB/s both reading and writing, both on Mac and Linux).

HFS+ is supported by Linux mostly out-of-the-box. To get write access even to a journaled partition on Ubuntu, install support via sudo apt-get install hfsprogs and when the drive is mounted (e.g., automatically), re-mount it writable using sudo mount -o remount,force,rw /mount/point

BTW, recently I suffered from a Mac OS crash apparently due to fuse-ext2
https://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-ext2/forums/forum/787602/topic/6549364

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    I've run dual-boot with a shared HFS+ partition for years. While the HFS+ option was fast, it was also not very reliable. If you want read/write access, you have to turn of the HFS+ journaling, and HFS+ will fully self-distruct from time to time without the journaling. Jan 15, 2013 at 3:39

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