If you ever need to read an extfs3 or extfs4 (linux) file system, from a drive taken from, say, a NAS like the Synology NASes (or taken from a LInux OS PC)... or you're using a USB3 or eSATA drive, external to the NAS, as backup...
I was able to easily read the drive under Windows 7, 64 bit, as follows...
Using a freeware driver and app for Windows..
http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/
This installed in 1 minute, is not big. Nice GUI.
Here's how I tested:
On Synology NAS, I connected a 1TB drive in a USB3 enclosure. Then I did a simple copy of a folder that contained 150GB of a zillion files, large and small.
I then unmounted the drive on the NAS, moved the USB3 to my windows 7 64 bit PC.
Ran the freeware, "DiskInternals Linux Reader" as from above.
That software displayed the folder/files on the ext4fs, in a Windows-explorer-like display.
I opened and viewed a few files, including zip files which checked OK.
I then told the freeware to copy the top level folder and all files/folders from the ext4fs drive to a Windows 7 NTFS drive on the PC.
Reading from USB3 and writing to NTFS was much, much slower than writing all these files on the NAS, but it worked. Slow, I guess, due to the freeware driver having lots of Windows HAL overhead. And perhaps you don't need to read/recover 100% of the files under Windows, e.g., the USB3 drive is a backup of key NAS files in case the NAS gets corrupted and you lose the files (with all due respect to RAID).
So after the copy to Windows, the files all had the correct last-modifed date... and the big files (ones larger than 4GB), copied OK. This is a sore point, because so often I see such processes, esp. when using FAT32 (not so here) the file dates are lost.
Good experiment outcome!
I was able to easily read the drive under Windows 7, 64 bit, as follows...
Using a freeware driver and app for Windows..
http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/
This installed in 1 minute, is not big. Nice GUI.
Here's how I tested:
On Synology NAS, I connected a 1TB drive in a USB3 enclosure. Then I did a simple copy of a folder that contained 150GB of a zillion files, large and small.
I then unmounted the drive on the NAS, moved the USB3 to my windows 7 64 bit PC.
Ran the freeware, "DiskInternals Linux Reader" as from above.
That software displayed the folder/files on the ext4fs, in a Windows-explorer-like display.
I opened and viewed a few files, including zip files which checked OK.
I then told the freeware to copy the top level folder and all files/folders from the ext4fs drive to a Windows 7 NTFS drive on the PC.
Reading from USB3 and writing to NTFS was much, much slower than writing all these files on the NAS, but it worked. Slow, I guess, due to the freeware driver having lots of Windows HAL overhead. And perhaps you don't need to read/recover 100% of the files under Windows, e.g., the USB3 drive is a backup of key NAS files in case the NAS gets corrupted and you lose the files (with all due respect to RAID).
So after the copy to Windows, the files all had the correct last-modifed date... and the big files (ones larger than 4GB), copied OK. This is a sore point, because so often I see such processes, esp. when using FAT32 (not so here) the file dates are lost.
Good experiment outcome!
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