title: ext2 "image" files vs real ext2 devices
body: <p>I'm tasked with writing a reader program for windows that is able read an ext2 partition.</p>
  
  <p>For my testing I'm using a drive I formatted to ext2 and a file I created using mkfs (a file that does mount and work well under linux)</p>
  
  <p>For some reason when I read the superblock from the drive (the real one) I get all the right meta-data (i.e. block size, inode count etc..) but doing the exact same thing to the file returns bad results (which make no sense).</p>
  
  <p>is there a difference between the 2?</p>
  
  <p>I open the drive using \.\X:
  and I make the file using mkfs.</p>