How to mount ext4 in windows 11
EXT4 in Windows
Timecodes:
so how do you interact with a Linux
partition in Windows there's a lot of
different ways to do this but ext4 is
typically the one thing that you can do
in Windows but it's kind of hidden so
I'm in an article today let's get on the
desktop and we're going to get in and
review this entire thing let's not waste
any time just look over the requirements
if you're on Windows 11 you're good to
go if you're on Windows 10 you're
probably going to need a later version
just do win ver so if you go down to run
and just type win ver right there you
can see obviously this Windows 11 so
it's always going to be over 22 000 but
older versions of Windows 10 I think
it's 21 H2 or 21 H1 one of those uh in
the past year or two should be good and
obviously newer the other catch to this
is this is internal hard drives so it
does not count USB drives it's just the
limitation of Windows and NTFS I'm gonna
probably do a video coming up about not
using NTFS for Windows which is going to
be interesting because NTFS is just
awful no one likes it so let's just
first list the drives that we're capable
of let's just pull up our Powershell
paste that in and you can see I have
quite a few drives here and I don't know
what's ext4 what's not so where do we go
for that probably the easiest way is
just use a Partition Wizard here and
then try it out and look at each one
using the Disk Management from Windows
it never tells you to type using WSL for
like blkid doesn't work because it
doesn't have access to the drives so
that's where we get creative like ease
us partition Master I've used that in
the past it's not too bad personally my
favorites like mini tool partition free
is probably one of the best ones and
we're just going to install that let
this go through and now we have our base
install here and you can really see what
each one on its reading so here's a disc
5 ext4 that's a GPT disk of 232
gigabytes so that's something we can use
that's going to be the 960 Evo 250.
let's pull this up
rerun our Command to list the disks
let's see if disc 5 and this one matches
up there should be two partitions to
this one
so some identifiers here before we
switch back to our terminal is looking
at this this is the thing I actually
have another one of these so how do I
differentiate between the two drives you
could look at IDs a lot of different
ways of doing this probably the easiest
this has two partitions this one does
not so if we pull this up okay which one
has two partitions well here's one and
here's one this is an 850 this is a 960.
we're looking for the 960. here's
another 960 but that only has zero
partitions so it looks like drive four
is going to be our ext4 Drive let's go
ahead and mount that but a lot of Guides
Online will steer you wrong here and
want you to mount a specific partition
now you could do that but I really like
doing it all in Linux once I mount and
give access to this drive so looking
back at our cheat sheet there's
something called a bear amount and that
does not mount a partition it actually
just mounts the drive itself so we're
going to go WSL dash dash Mount and then
the disk path this is going to look like
this
dash dash Mount and then we're going to
grab that disk with two partitions right
here
we'll right click right click bam and
mount now this would Mount but it would
fail all right that's fine we forgot the
bear command
all right the disk is already attached
let's go into WSL or we can just click
on the drop down menu and go into
ubuntu's the one I'm using right here
let's do an LL speak okay alrighty we
have a 256. you can see this is the one
that it's mounting it has that two
partitions sdb2 is what we need there is
no Mount Point yet so let's make a mount
Point let's try just doing it in Linux
first with sudo Mount Dev sdb 2 MNT and
then we'll just call this one extra
and it says there's no Mount Point
existing there which is fine we'll just
make the directory MNT extra re-run that
command and now if we go into m t extra
do a listing oh look at that we have all
of the the mounts and if we do it I'll
just be okay you can see that mount
point there so that's kind of nice we
could access it through WSL but this
isn't perfect because we can only access
it in WSL if we pull up our Explorer
well we still don't have any access to
that ext4 drive in our Windows system
only the internal subsystem which is not
ideal in some cases some people are you
know crazy and want to actually edit
their ext4 file system or access the
files directly from file explorer let's
do that now so what I'm going to just do
is come back into here sudo you mount
then we just type that mount Point like
that
and if we get a Target busy well
time to reboot it's Windows after all
let's just give this a reboot and come
back to desktop all right back on our
desktop let's pull up our terminal once
again
and this time we're gonna just
do our Mount uh let's first query make
sure that the drives hadn't changed it's
still drive for great
Let's uh we could mount it as a bear or
we could now choose a different path and
this is an interesting one now we can
specify the specific partition partition
one we know is the boot partition
partition two is the one with all their
data so that's gonna be the one we want
to do so before we launch into WSL this
time we're going to go partition and
then we're gonna go partition two not
number one and it should Mount our EXT
partition
looks like it is successful says it
mounted it under m t WSL which is cool
but there's one extra thing it did here
if we pull up our File Explorer by doing
it through terminal we now have on the
left hand side Linux and if we look at
Linux we should have access to that
mount directly into here which if we go
M into T WSL you can see this is
everything so if we wanted to copy a
bunch of files out of here let's say you
had a bunch of stuff in your home folder
you can come into here and copy it out
obviously I don't have anything here in
my home folder I usually always use a
separate drive for all my personal data
but needless to say this is a good way
to access ext4 in Windows
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