any recommendations on freeware that will let me browse an ext2 drive and make them properly view, copy, drag/drop-able in windows.
ta
Assuming Windows 10 and a recent Linux, NTFS is your best bet. You can even have /home on an NTFS partition and just use that, it'll be easily accessible from both.
Are you talking about a bare drive - eg, an external hard drive - or something on a running Linux box?
I've always found it easier to put the drive in a Linux machine and copy over the network by WinSCP or a Samba share.
My attempts to find a way to mount ext2/3/4 drives directly in Windows have failed (Admittedly I've not tried *very* hard).
I have 2 drives in a nas dns-323 that has failed firmware or something. When it was working, the drive allowed typical windows file actions and browsing.
I can access the drives via a usb thingymawhatsit, see the partitions but can't browse the drive as its ext2.
I've googled lots of things but nothing seems to give a practical solution. Most allow me to view folders and individual files but not bulk copy the 400gb of data into a Windows environment, just clone to another ext2 partition
I assumed being that most of stw eat Linux for breakfast it'd be more fruitful than google 😉
You could boot the computer from a live usb stick such as https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-create-a-usb-stick-on-windows#0 from there you can copy over the files you want to your windows disk.
Benn00 has by far the easiest solution. Being as it's 400g you might want to set it going and go to bed / work / dinner as it will take a fair amount of time unless you are USBC ed up
If you're happy with the command line, you can install Ubuntu directly into Windows these days.
If not, I'd go with what Ben said.
Thanks, I'll give that a go!
Or install Linux Reader in Windows. It should let your access ext2 disks, and copy stuff off. https://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/
Gparted will allow you to copy partitions, and you can boot it live, but the live USB is a similar idea and is easier to use