How to read ext4 partitions in Windows?

There was a utility called ext2read to browse Ext partitions in Windows (including Ext4 partitions) which may not work anymore as mentioned in the comment below by @heynnema and could corrupt your partitions.

The project isn't updated since 2012

ext4 has some support through the older ext2* projects. btrfs has no current Windows support. New filesystems are always going to have a period where there's no support on another operating system and, frankly, that's going to suck.

It should also be mentioned that projects that try to read the filesystem into another system are always going to give you an increased risk of noshing up your partition.

So with that in mind, there is one solution that would take perhaps 30 minutes to an hour to set up that would give you near-native speed, any Linux partition support and would be just as safe (or very close to) as mounting it from Linux: Virtualise!

Yeah I'm suggesting you give up 300megs of RAM and a gig of disk space to run Ubuntu Server from within Windows. Most modern virtualisation systems like Virtualbox and VMWare allow you to pass the VM an entire disk or partition so that's what you'd do. Mount it from within virtual-ubuntu, install samba, share the ubuntu-mounted disks and mount the shares from within Windows.

It sounds like a lot of overhead but Ubuntu server is pretty slick and it won't need much in the way of resources. Once installed, you could probably get away with 150megs of RAM for it.

If you're talking about a dual-boot system, Windows cannot natively read Linux-formated partitions. Therefore, you have two options.

Recommended solution - Shared storage

Create a NTFS partition that will hold the files that you wish to be accessible from both Windows and Ubuntu, and store your files there.

This is the recommended, safe solution.

Alternate solution - Third-party software

Software is available for Windows that allows you to read and write to Linux partitions, to some extent.

One example of such software is Ext2Fsd. Ext2Fsd has limited EXT4 support. By default, it will load the filesystems in read-only mode, but you can enable read-write mode if you really want to. This is, however, not recommended.

• EXT4 partitions mounted using Ext2Fsd will be displayed as EXT3. This is normal.

Note that these features of the fourth extended filesystem are unsuported:

• Journal: log-based operations, external journal
• Extent: size truncating & expanding, file deletion

• Extended Attributes: ACL support

• Note: an error may be displayed after installing Ext2Fsd; the application still works.

After installation, restart your computer and open Ext2 Volume Manager from the Start menu.

This is where you assign or change the drive letters for your Linux partitions, mount and unmount them, or perform other operations.

If you want to enable write support for an EXT4 filesystem, select Ext2 Management, uncheck the Mount volume in readonly mode box and then click Apply.

You can also select if you want your Linux partition to be automatically mounted on startup (you shouldn't use this option for USB drives and removable media).

Note: this solution is far from perfect and data corruption may occur on your Linux partition. Use this at your own risk!