How to read btrfs partitions on windows natively?
Basically the same asHow to read ext4 partitions on Windows ?.
As I wanted to enjoy btrfs features such as transparent compression or auto defragmentation, I installed my Linux system on a btrfs subvolume.
I tried ᴜꜰꜱ explorer, but it is unable to read most of my files.
So how to retrieve my Linux music files without having to reboot ?
I only want read access, not writing any bytes on the filesystem (my Linux system being currently suspended on disk).
A better option would being able to export directories as a tar archive in order to keep permission and attributes.
Solution 1:
WinBtrfs
Just because this thread comes up in Google, I would like to echo noctrex's answer in recommending WinBtrfs (GitHub), an experimental Windows Btrfs driver. Among its other features, it supports:
- Reading and writing of Btrfs filesystems
- Basic RAID: RAID0, RAID1, and RAID10
- Advanced RAID: RAID5 and RAID6
- Getting and setting of Access Control Lists (ACLs), using the xattr security.NTACL
- Hard links
- Sparse files
- zlib compression
- LZO compression
You can choose to mount it read-only after installation by modifying the registry entries in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\btrfs, and I've found it to be very stable (if a bit slow) even with six mounted Btrfs partitions and very frequent reads from one of them.
It does support writes to the disk, but as the software is still in development (and comes with the important disclaimer that "YOU USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. I take NO RESPONSIBILITY for any damage it may do to your filesystem. DO NOT USE THIS DRIVER UNLESS YOU HAVE FULL AND UP-TO-DATE BACKUPS OF ALL YOUR DATA"), it's probably inadvisable to not mount it read-only. (Unfortunately, by default it mounts with writes enabled, so you do have to go into the registry and change that. You should definitely have backups, in any case.)
Solution 2:
In VBOX you can create a virtual disk device pointing to the raw disk device. You can also do this with VMWARE with an online vm creator or workstation trial then use vmware free player and of course you can do this in HyperV for free.
http://www.serverwatch.com/server-tutorials/using-a-physical-hard-drive-with-a-virtualbox-vm.html
It will be interesting to see if driver support comes to Linux on Windows...
http://www.howtogeek.com/249966/how-to-install-and-use-the-linux-bash-shell-on-windows-10/