Solved Can Windows 11 Pro read EXT4 formatted external drives natively?

I am not familiar with Mint. Last time I used Ubuntu and Mac OS a few years ago, read only access to NTFS was the default. You had to issue some commands in the Terminal to enable full access. The reason was that they might corrupt an NTFS partition under certain circumstances, and so not enabled by default. I guess this is not the case anymore and so full NTFS access might be the new default.

I haven't used the new/current macOS but when I had Mac OS X on a MacBook Pro did have to add an app to enable using NTFS on it.

After a little more pondering I reformated my Samsung T7 4TB SSD external with an NTFS partition. I will then use a Samsung 512GB MicroSD card with an OTG adapter or the Send Anywhere application to send files to & from my Android.

Cheers!

XxXxX said:

Windows can not 'natively' read/write or even see ext4 partitions.
DiskGenius should be able to read ext4 but am unsure if it can write from ext4.

as stated above a live Linux distro would be able to move data from the ext4 partitions/drives to another location.

hope this is of help, best of luck. Steve ..

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Yes DG can read ext 4. If that is all that is needed the free edition is a simple solution. It is smallish portable program.
As far as I know it needs paid Pro edition to write to ext 4.

Could give it a try and see if it does what the op wants.

spapakons said:

Linux and Mac OS access NTFS as read only by default. However you can enable read/write access from the Terminal. I don't remember details. So you can enable read/write access and use an NTFS disk.

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That's not true these days -- years ago you had to install package ntfs-3g on Linux to read/write NTFS files. Now most distros have the "fuse" module built into the kernel which has NTFS read/write.

Running with exFAT on Linux isn't really a good idea, for speed with reasonable resilience use XFS, and for mega good resilience use BTRFS and simply share linux files with Windows via SAMBA.

Both those systems are good journalling systems which mean any sort of recovery is usually fairly simple - with BTRFS the logs are replayed automatically while xfs_repair fixes in 99% of cases XFS file systems after an OS crash.

Windows resiliency isn't that great --at least on the Non server editions.

@SIW2

If you just want to read / write ext4 files to /from Windows simply boot up any Live Linux distro -- most have GUI versions available, install SAMBA if not already installed (some live distros have persistence which means you can install some software which remains after a re-boot) and share between Linux and Windows. Run even in a VM so you can run Windows and the Linux live system concurrently too.

Cheers
jimbo

I don't doubt it works with SAMBA, but the point is to do it as easy as possible from File Explorer. So you either convert the disk to ExFAT or you enable ETX2/3/4 access in Windows with some third-party tool. I mentioned Paragon ExtFS because this is what I used a long time ago, that's what I know. A quick Google search reveals Linux Reader by Disk Internals: Freeware Linux Reader™ for Windows

PS: This is read only access, you cannot write.

PS2: See also: Ext2 File System Driver for Windows