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I reformatted my Seagate 200Gb external disk to use reiserfs. Don’t remember why, but it hasn’t really mattered. Recently I had a situation where I needed to copy multiple gigabytes from the disk onto a system running Windows XP. Try as I might, the Windows system was saying it saw my USB Storage Device, but it never actually showed up anywhere on the system. No drive to be seen. Then I remembered my move from NTFS to reiserfs. Fudge!

The answer to the seemingly impossible task was to use rfstool, a really cool hack by Gerson Kurz. His page includes some docs on the first steps you take to find the correct device, and then explain how I could copy an entire tree from the external drive onto the local system with the single command

rfstool cp /src d:\work\src

That was so quick and easy! And much, much faster than my first attempt: plug it into my Linux laptop, mount the disk, set up Samba to share it, and then make the Windows machine copy it all over the (really slow for reasons you’ll never want to know) network using Samba. Bleah.

Thanks, Gerson!