[Nottingham] CoLinux, ext4

[Richard Ward]

I wonder if anyone has any ideas that could help me out. I'll explain
the problem then explain why I'm having it.

Problem:
I have root access to a machine with debian on it and can do anything
to to it except update the kernel. The kernel predates ext4 but I have
a block device with an ext4 volume on it that I want to read/write to
(and I believe this means I can't mount it as an ext3 volume). What
should I do?

Reason:
I dual boot Ubuntu and windows, and my main large drive with all my
stuff on it is ext3. I used to use a utility that allowed mount of
this drive in windows using IFS, which had many problems. My root
Ubuntu partition was reiserfs, so I had no access to that at all.
A month or so ago I started playing around with CoLinux.
In case you don't know CoLinux, its the linux kernel re-compiled as an
nt-kernel module which allows runnig of unmodified linux binaries
inside windows, doing all resource management etc itself, so it can
install and run, say, a vanilla version of debian appearing as a
separate machine on your network and using the X server running on the
Windows host to display windows (so sadly no opengl!). It can also be
given raw access to block devices on any disk that can be seen by the
host.
So then I could have CoLinux read/write my ext3 AND resierfs
partitions and share them with samba to the Windows host, which worked
like a dream. It even allowed me to do away with my dedicated svn
server which I set up so I could check in/out whatever machine I was
booted into.
However I just installed the latest Ubuntu, and opted for ext4, which
the CoLinux kernel doesn't understand, and I suspect that recompiling
the CoLinux kernel would be an unpleasant task.

Thanks for any ideas!

Richard.

P.S. I've already thought of the obvious "Use a different file system
and stop making things complicated for yourself" and dismissed it as
being defeatist.