Author Topic: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4  (Read 2973 times)

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Offline suicidal_orange

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Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« on: Wed, 30 January 2019, 03:47:09 »
I mainly use Linux but am now playing a game sometimes and it's easier to boot win7 than set up an emulator/VM.  I thought it would be good to mount my music partition (ext4) to be able to listen while playing, so tried every free program I could find.  No joy.  Now I have two problems which are probably related.

1 - I have a broken M: drive (the letter I was trying to use for 'music')

This M: drive doesn't exist in administrative tools or any of the three ext4 mounting programs but it's not available to use either.  Opening the drive in explorer the error message suggests it's a disconnected network drive, which it definitely isn't as I don't have any.  Is there anywhere else to look?  Any way to delete the mount/letter?

2 - The drive spins up randomly

The drive has just one partition and windows can't read it, yet after spinning down after the timeout set as it should it spins up randomly after 5-20 minutes.  I've tried setting the drive 'offline' and that worked until I rebooted, but after the reboot the drive remains offline but still spins up randomly.

Anyone got any ideas (other than buying a big SSD so I don't notice the noise and nothing's actually getting worn - it is tempting!)
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Offline AJM

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #1 on: Wed, 30 January 2019, 09:20:42 »
Concerning problem 1:
Unless you haven't tried that already, open a "cmd" windows as Administrator and then start "diskmgmt.msc" (for disk management).
Maybe you can find out more about that ominous drive "M:" there.

Offline fohat.digs

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #2 on: Wed, 30 January 2019, 09:28:04 »
I think that disk management will show that there is a drive existing there, but I doubt that it will let you in.

As I recall there is some 3rd party software that will let Windows read it, but I don't have access to it here at work.
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Offline suicidal_orange

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #3 on: Wed, 30 January 2019, 17:35:05 »
Concerning problem 1:
Unless you haven't tried that already, open a "cmd" windows as Administrator and then start "diskmgmt.msc" (for disk management).
Maybe you can find out more about that ominous drive "M:" there.
Nice, didn't know you could run it that way.  You can type it straight into the start menu search thing too once you know the name and right click for admin :)

Sadly it's the same thing as is in Administrative tools and it doesn't seem to know anything about M, apart from not allowing me to chose it.  I think this screenshot shows everything?

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Offline tp4tissue

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #4 on: Wed, 30 January 2019, 18:24:52 »
Concerning problem 1:
Unless you haven't tried that already, open a "cmd" windows as Administrator and then start "diskmgmt.msc" (for disk management).
Maybe you can find out more about that ominous drive "M:" there.
Nice, didn't know you could run it that way.  You can type it straight into the start menu search thing too once you know the name and right click for admin :)

Sadly it's the same thing as is in Administrative tools and it doesn't seem to know anything about M, apart from not allowing me to chose it.  I think this screenshot shows everything?

(Attachment Link)

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Offline suicidal_orange

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #5 on: Wed, 30 January 2019, 18:33:23 »
SuicidOrange haz not enuff Drive space,  how u stores dem' UHD isos.

Tp4 recommends upgrade to 64TB storage cluster.

This is a computer not a cinema, there's not a UHD screen in the house and the only full HD is downstairs.  The computer has music, a web browser, a paint program to scribble when people have keyboard matrix problems and a couple of games and that's about it.

What's the point of keeping hundreds of movies anyway, is your memory broken so you can watch them repeatedly without boredom?
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Offline tp4tissue

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #6 on: Wed, 30 January 2019, 18:37:07 »
SuicidOrange haz not enuff Drive space,  how u stores dem' UHD isos.

Tp4 recommends upgrade to 64TB storage cluster.

This is a computer not a cinema, there's not a UHD screen in the house and the only full HD is downstairs.  The computer has music, a web browser, a paint program to scribble when people have keyboard matrix problems and a couple of games and that's about it.

What's the point of keeping hundreds of movies anyway, is your memory broken so you can watch them repeatedly without boredom?

Must increase Drive Capacity,  m0ar drives m0ar cyborg enhance.

Orange can watch UHD material on HD screens, it's Significantly better than Vanilla Bluray.


Offline suicidal_orange

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #7 on: Wed, 30 January 2019, 18:47:47 »
Must increase Drive Capacity,  m0ar drives m0ar cyborg enhance.

Orange can watch UHD material on HD screens, it's Significantly better than Vanilla Bluray.


What about downscaling UHD to 1600x900?  Sounds ridiculous but as my lone monitor is 4:3 that's what I'd have to do.  Obviously it's not wired up to surround speakers either so the 7.1 will need to be mashed into stereo...
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Offline fohat.digs

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #8 on: Wed, 30 January 2019, 20:09:51 »

it doesn't seem to know anything about M, apart from not allowing me to chose it.


That's what i was talking about. i can't personally vouch for these, but it is a place to start searching:

https://www.howtogeek.com/112888/3-ways-to-access-your-linux-partitions-from-windows/

https://thelinuxcode.com/mount-linux-partition-ext4-ext3-ext2-windows-10-8-7/
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Offline suicidal_orange

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #9 on: Thu, 31 January 2019, 03:34:52 »
Thanks fohat, I've tried ext2fsd and ext2ifs and they both work as far as mounting but ask me to format the partition when I try to open it in explorer, I've just checked there are no mounts still active in them.  DiskInternals reader "can't open disk" so that's the end of that.   Ext2explore from one of your links was a new one and it's the best so far - I can see an item called Music when opening the partition but it's not a folder so I can't open it :))

At this point I've given up seeing my music and just want the noise gone and to stop my drive power cycling and killing itself slowly!

Edit:  Removed all the ext4 readers and M: has disappeared.  Drive set offline and is now quiet - at least until I reboot
« Last Edit: Thu, 31 January 2019, 04:46:22 by suicidal_orange »
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Offline tp4tissue

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #10 on: Thu, 31 January 2019, 08:16:44 »
Must increase Drive Capacity,  m0ar drives m0ar cyborg enhance.

Orange can watch UHD material on HD screens, it's Significantly better than Vanilla Bluray.


What about downscaling UHD to 1600x900?  Sounds ridiculous but as my lone monitor is 4:3 that's what I'd have to do.  Obviously it's not wired up to surround speakers either so the 7.1 will need to be mashed into stereo...

Mmmm... well As Long As you've got a decently powerful GPU to run Madvr-renderer,  it will still look better than even many 1080p monitors..

Something like a 1050/ti/1060 will be required.

Offline Leslieann

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #11 on: Thu, 31 January 2019, 23:25:32 »
The program you used may have mounted the drive as a network drive as a way of skirting MS security and tricking it. That said, be very careful with this sort of stuff that isn't native, a few years ago I was using one on a Mac (a well known program) and it corrupted the entire partition.

The easiest way to deal with all this is to add another partition that is ntfs or fat32 or another drive, but I hate doing this. Best advice I can give is do what I did a few years ago, if you are using multiple OS, build a cheap file server. It eliminates all the formatting issues, you can access your data even if your system is down (if you use a laptop), and you can offload large jobs that don''t need your input to it leaving your desktop free. Want to download a massive file while you game? No problem, let the server do it, need to compile something, let the server do it. Even if it takes longer, it's not tying you up.

It doesn't have to be anything special, you can build one from a Raspberry pi and a external drive, or whatever you have laying around. As an added bonus I can turn off my power hungry system at night (180watts idle, may be less now with new monitors) and let the energy efficient headless server (about 15 watts) stay running, it actually saves me money on electricity. Once you get used to having a  setup like this it's hard to go back because it just makes managing your data and your desktop so much simpler. It's on a system no one uses so you have some virus security (especially if it's a different OS, hard to infect Linux from windows and vice versa), it's not under a high load so it's not under stress, and even if your desktop gets trashed, the bulk of your data is on another system and that system can perform backups regardless as to what you are doing. Oh and don't get a NAS, build a server from scraps. It's cheaper to build, cheaper to upgrade and it can do far more than a NAS.
« Last Edit: Thu, 31 January 2019, 23:27:44 by Leslieann »
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Offline xtrafrood

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Re: Windows drive letter management and reading ext4
« Reply #12 on: Sat, 02 February 2019, 05:39:19 »
2 - Sounds like Windows wants to index the drive but can't.

A few years ago I found that NTFS was my solution to issues in sharing between Windows and Linux distros and other Unix based OSs. IIRC most Linux kernels can read NTFS without the need to install additional packages. I have my movies, music, daily snapshots, and PDFs (6GB+) on that NTFS drive. I've successfully accessed the (read & write) NTFS partition with Arch Linux, FreeBSD, NomadBSD, KDE Neon, NetBSD, and Slackware without fault. And the NTFS HDD is also shared over my network through Nextcloud. As far as proprietary file systems go NTFS is pretty versatile.

In the future I plan to migrate the NTFS data to a FreeNAS (or Seafile) server that I can access over the network (like Leslieann is saying). That or give Nextcloud a few GBs of cache. But ZFS tho.. *shrugs*