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I have an SD card formatted as ext4 for use with SteamOS and EmuDeck. I want to add files to this SD card from my Windows 11 PC using a SD to USB adapter. Most of the the ext4 programs I've found only support reading without writing. WSL2 doesn't support mounting USB drives. I can't switch my drive format to NTFS as it's not compatible with EmuDeck.

How do I write files to an ext4 partition on a USB drive in Windows 11?

Note: This differs from How to read ext4 partitions on Windows? which only covers reading from ext4 partitions. The linked question was also asked in 2009, meaning several of the answers are outdated and no longer work.

Stevoisiak
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3 Answers3

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You need an ext4 file system driver for windows. As others stated, windows doesn't have this built in. But there are third-party solutions for this. For read and write access I'm only aware of this:
Linux File Systems for Windows by Paragon Software

They provide a trial for 10 days.

I'm not affiliated with this company. I just use their tools on a occasional basis.

Previous versions (2.1.440) of this tool seemed to be free for private use. Probably your favorite software/utility download site has it. I found it on this site: wintotal (sorry it's in german).

Tom Yan
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Thomas Anderson
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Windows cannot write to EXT4, because this is a journaling file-system that Windows has not fully implemented. This is why writing is much more difficult than reading.

You have two options :

However, my preference would have been to rather use a file-system format that is fully supported by both operating systems, such as NTFS, exFAT or the limited FAT32.

harrymc
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I personally set up the SD card as a Samba (windows) network share on the steam deck. Add user account that you use on Windows to the SD card sharing permissions. Then easy access over the network, no problem with filesystems or need to remove the SD card.

RichEO
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