Windows 10 Handling of RPi SD Image

I recently bought a USB/SD Card Reader because my PC doesn't have one.
I use a RaspBerry Pi 4 4GB for my astrophotography and I am running AstroBerry OS.
When I inserted the SD Card into the USB Reader...

Amazon.ca Something Went Wrong / Quelque chose s'est mal passe

my Windows 10 File Explorer acted strangely.
It showed an N: drive as rootfs and an M: drive.

When I right-clicked on the N: drive and clicked on Eject, I didn't get the "Safe to Remove" message - same with the M: drive.
I removed the Card Reader.
I closed File Explorer and opened it again and the two drives were still listed.
I closed File Explorer again and Clicked to Restart the PC.
RESTARTING displayed on the screen for a good 10 minutes and did not restart - I had to press the RESET button.

Windows 7 on my laptop acted normally in all aspects, showing only one drive and Ejecting the drive worked perfectly.

Windows 10 seems to have a problem with an EXT4 partition. (latest version of Win10).

Bree said:

I have a similar card reader to yours, except it just takes one SD card, there's no second slot for a micro SD. It seems that some type of readers will appear as an empty drive letter for each possible card when plugged in, even if no card is present. I just get the one letter though. Not all types of readers do this though, I have another type of usb multi-card reader that doesn't appear as a drive letter until a card is plugged into it.

That is not the case with mine, though. I am only using the SD card slot, not the smaller slot, and it is a 64GB card. No drives show up unless a card is inserted. Why would it?



Yes, File Explorer will have problems. Windows does not support Ext4, except for the very limited case of being able to use it within the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/comma...ows-and-wsl-2/


There are 3rd-party solutions if you need to read Ext4 in Windows.

How to Access Ext4 from Windows | DiskInternals
How to Read EXT4 Partitions in Windows 11/10/8/7?

Windows 7 doesn't seem to have a problem with EXT4 partitions.
Besides, I bought the Reader so I could clone the SD RPi image as a backup on my Windows 10 PC - that is all.
Right now I have to use my Windows 7 laptop to do the cloning. The laptop already has an SD card reader.
Regular partitions (NTFS or FAT) work flawlessly with the reader.

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I don't think my point is getting across.
Windows 10 is losing its brains when it encounters a medium with an EXT4 partition on it.
It won't Restart, it won't Shutdown and it is affecting at least one of the programs on the PC (e-mail Client) to the extent that it forces it to reset to default settings.
Something is amiss here.
Can someone explain what might be going on here?
Thanks.

dlwmacgregor said:

Windows 7 doesn't seem to have a problem with EXT4 partitions.
Besides, I bought the Reader so I could clone the SD RPi image as a backup on my Windows 10 PC - that is all.
Right now I have to use my Windows 7 laptop to do the cloning. The laptop already has an SD card reader.
Regular partitions (NTFS or FAT) work flawlessly with the reader.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't think my point is getting across.
Windows 10 is losing its brains when it encounters a medium with an EXT4 partition on it.
It won't Restart, it won't Shutdown and it is affecting at least one of the programs on the PC (e-mail Client) to the extent that it forces it to reset to default settings.
Something is amiss here.
Can someone explain what might be going on here?
Thanks.

Metaphorically speaking:
"Diesel" in a "gasoline" engine or vice versa.
Both are IC engines and run on fuel, but...

Yeah. Don't hook up your RasPi card directly to Windows 10 or 11, obviously it doesn't like it.

If you want to back up the SD card do it this way:

How to Back Up Your Raspberry Pi SD Card on Windows

Catnip said:

Yeah. Don't hook up your RasPi card directly to Windows 10 or 11, obviously it doesn't like it.

If you want to back up the SD card do it this way:

How to Back Up Your Raspberry Pi SD Card on Windows

Thanks.
I knew how to do it. I've always used my Windows 7 laptop with Belena Etcher with the one internal card reader.
Now I can use 2.
I never used my Windows 10 PC because it didn't have a card reader, which is why I never saw this effect.

I was just wondering why Win10 goes so haywire.