1

I have looked all over the place for a decent solution to this dilemma, including exhaustive Google searches, and I have not found anything useful at all. I don't want a separate, independent program to look into my Ubuntu installation for files, but the only things I have found either have limited support for ext4 or none at all. It only recognizes as a separate partition on my HDD in all utilities I have found, up to and including partition managers, which are unable to even recognize the partition type (not even improperly as ext3, which is common).

I would prefer at least an extension for Windows Explorer, but the closest one I have found is Ext2Fsd, which is a system driver for ext2/3, but almost everywhere I've read, it is practically useless in the majority of situations for anything ext4-related. Is there anything that could possibly be found to help my situation?

(Background: I went from Windows 7 only to a Windows 7/Ubuntu dual boot in the last few months, but it is not very fun to have all my Windows stuff accessible with Ubuntu, while having an impossible iron curtain vice versa.)

Improve this question
2
  • 1
    Nope! Not really. Microsoft doesn't recognize anything but NTFS, FAT32 (barely!) and ISO9660/UDF. If you want to share files between the two, I'd recommend a separate FAT32 partition that both can access. They don't read HFS+ (Mac OSX) either. If Microsoft recognized the other filesystems, that would imply they accepted them as peers. Of course, they don't. But Mac will read FAT32, and perhaps NTFS. Not ext2/3/4 or anything else. Again, it's a vendor lock-in thing I suppose. But a Linux box will read ALL of them out-of-the-box. How strange.
    – lornix
    Commented Jul 25, 2013 at 2:27
  • I understand that none of them would work right out of the box, but I was looking for something to install to add support (just like it is near impossible to read the filesystem on iOS devices with any OS outside of OSX).
    – Claudia
    Commented Jul 30, 2013 at 12:48

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
0

There are some Ext2 drivers availible for Windows, which might allow you to mount and ext4 partition (since Ext4 is designed to be backwards-compatible). I know of two options you could use: THIS one, and THIS one.

Improve this answer
1
  • Which of the two would have better support for ext4 between your two links (Ext4Fsd and Ext4 IFS)? (I am not often on this site, sadly, and forgot for a bit...)
    – Claudia
    Commented Jul 30, 2013 at 12:45

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .