Are there free CLI tools for Windows (7) which allow me to partition and format an ext3 file system on a external USB drive from Windows natively? I am not looking for a solution with a bootable live medium or a virtual machine.
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
Easus partition manager, and other partitioning programs for windows will format in ext. I have used easus particularly in XP to do it. (the home version because it was free)
Note: some of the partitioning programs can have a setting for showing "removables" or not, in the situation that mabey you do not see the disk at first.
"ext2fsd" If you then want to see what is going on via the system at that point, you will need a driver for that file system. http://www.ext2fsd.com/
ADDING:
Need CLI, the next Program that it brought to mind is Paragons partitioning tools. http://kb.paragon-software.com/paragon/include/templ/object2.jsp?catId=2124&objId=1343&statId=1954834&foLang=en <-- as we can see at this link paragon provides for scripting, in many of thier products, and also for scripting thier high end partitioning programs . I have no idea how that would work, or if it would even do what you want.
You can use to live-cd of Gparted and with unetbootin you can write it on a Usb key (Formated in format Fat32)
