How to make Windows read ext4, zfs, etc. linux drives?

Question

In linux packages like ntfs-3g enable linux systems to read and write to NTFS drives. However when I connect a drive that was previously used in linux to a Windows system, Windows does not recognize the drive. Are there any utilities that enable Windows to read and write to linux partition schemes?

Answer 1

You can now also do this with the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

To mount linux partitions with WSL, you need to have a WSL distribution installed. (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install / https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/how-to-install-wsl2-on-windows-10)

Step 1: Read the Disks Device ID from wmic (with CMD.exe)

wmic diskdrive list brief

which results in a table like this:

Caption                              DeviceID            Model                                Partitions  Size
Generic MassStorageClass USB Device  \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1  Generic MassStorageClass USB Device  0
WDC PC SN530 SDBPNPZ-1T00-1002       \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0  WDC PC SN530 SDBPNPZ-1T00-1002       5           1024203640320

You need the "DeviceID" of the disk that contains the linux partition you want to mount, and the Partition number. To Get the Partition number, use:

wmic diskdrive get manufacturer, model, partitions

and

wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index

to get the correct Partition number.

Step 2: Mount the partition using this command:

wsl --mount \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1 --partition 1 -t ext4

You can then open this path in explorer to access the linux partition:

\\wsl$\Ubuntu-20.04\mnt\wsl

Credit to Linux nightly ( https://linuxnightly.com/mount-and-access-hard-drives-in-windows-subsystem-for-linux-wsl/ )

If you'd rather mount the whole disk, use --bare and don't specify an option:

wsl --mount \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1 --bare

but then you need to manually mount the disk inside wsl. You can find more information here: ( https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-mount-disk )

Answer 2

For ext2/ext3/ext4 I use ext2fsd which despite being a dead project still works under Windows 10 just fine. Haven't tested it under W11.

I'd personally use a VM, e.g. VirtualBox with Linux + Samba/SFTP/FTP server to access other filesystems such as btrfs, XFS or ZFS. A native FS driver is better than anything available for Windows.