Phillip Susi wrote:Eric Sandeen wrote:
Exactly. If the data are protected you can use other software to access it. For ext3 an explicit ext2 mount might do it... but if you corrupt the underlying information, there's no going back.In that case you are mounting the same filesystem uner 2 differentNo, it has not been. Prior to poorly behaved journal playback, it was perfectly safe to mount a filesystem read only even if it was mounted read-write by another system ( possibly fsck or defrag ). You might not read the correct data from it, but you would not damage the underlying data simply by mounting it read-only.
operating systems simultaneously, which is, and always has been, a
recipe for disaster. Flagging the fs as "mounted already" would
probably be a better solution, though it's harder than it sounds at
first glance.
You might not damage the underlying filesystem, but you could sure go
off in the weeds trying to read it, if you stumbled upon some
half-updated metadata... so while it may be safe for the filesystem, I'm
not convinced that it's safe for the host reading the filesystem.