[ug-bosug] Mount and Access NTFS and Ext2FS from Solaris x86

[Moinak Ghosh]

Hi Folks,


   As I had mentioned before, a new SVR4 package is now available that
provides the following features:

    * Utility to dump detailed partition table info on x86 platforms
      (prtpart).
    * Ability to read-only mount EXT2FS and NTFS partitions (both*
      primary and extended*).
    * The utilities from e2fsprogs <http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/>
      compiled for OpenSolaris.
    * Some of the utilities from ntfsprogs <http://www.linux-ntfs.org/>
      compiled for OpenSolaris.

Download it from http://www.belenix.org <http://www.belenix.org/>

The read-only mount capability is an enhancement of the initial NTFS 
mount <http://mount-ntfs.sourceforge.net/>
work done by Martin Rosenau.

Essentially the approach is to run an instrumented userland NFS server that
reads raw blocks from a device and interprets them as per the filesystem 
format.

The NTFS support was already present in Martin's work and I modified it to
also suport Ext2FS using libext2fs from e2fsprogs. In addition I have done a
bunch of enhancements to integrate better with the OpenSolaris way of doing
things. So for eg. you can use "mount -F ext2fs ..." instead of having 
to run a
custom binary.