Is there a Windows Driver for BeFS?

Is there a Windows Driver for BeFS?

If not (and if there is any interest in this) I would be willing to work on one

Iirc only a read vetsion for linux

IIRC there was a read-only version back in 2000’s. Probably only for Win98 or so, so a new version would be probably welcomed.

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Where can I find the documentation for the format or even an implementation of it?

I can’t find it in the Haiku repo

It was a 3rd party driver. Use your favorite web search engine to look for it, i can’t recall the name of it, but you may find it with the BeFS windows driver keywords.

Haiku uses third party drivers?

Could be this one: Be Filesystem (BeFS) driver download | SourceForge.net (Linux)

No. Haiku don’t supply any driver for Windows. It was a 3rdparty driver unrelated to Haiku.

So how does Haiku read and write to BeFS? Where’s that code?

An this one for Windows: GitHub - HaikuArchives/ReadBFSWindows: Read a drive with the BeFS file system on it from a Windows PC.. You can contact @waddlesplash to ask to helping him.

To learn more about BFS read the “Practical File System Design with the Be File System” from Dominic Giampaolo: Practical File System Design with the Be File System - Free Computer, Programming, Mathematics, Technical Books, Lecture Notes and Tutorials

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Awesome! thanks

Seem to recall something about skyfs?

There was a Windows application that could let you pull navigate and pull files from SkyFS and hence BFS; it wasn’t a pluggable filesystem driver however. I have a copy, somewhere, but it would probably take weeks to find it.

Do you have a link to it?

No, I can’t find it online and I don’t have quick access to the hard drive I would have used it on.

I should have it around here somewhere also, but will need some digging into :wink:

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You don’t have to start from scratch, there was & still is a driver & a viewer you can improve, you can also get rid of the viewer and improve only the driver, the choice is yours.
here is the link to the source code

There is a fuse driver in the haiku code. It gives you write support on Linux. It could potentially also work on windows, there are a bunch of fuse compatibility layers for windows though they are not all that simple to port to.

If you want to develop access for a specific filesystem within Windows … you must not only knows BeFS, but rather how Windows manage filesystems.
You have to develop BeFS access as an Installable FileSystem, so you have to create BeFS.IFS

->>> Here you are a template as an opensource IFS for ext2/ext3 FS

http://www.fs-driver.org/

->>> Here you are a template as payable soluion from Paragon Software

– ext2/ext3/ext4, and read-onl XFS and BTRFS filesystems –

Good luck with development !

Cheeeeeeerrsss !! 8-D