Read a Raspberry Pi Filesystem on Windows

Introduction

Ever find yourself into a situation where you want to copy a file from your Raspberry Pi only to find that all you have is the SD card with Raspbian OS on it. Well, I did, so here's a tutorial on how to read the contents of a Raspbian SD image on Windows.

Normally you cannot mount a Raspbian filesystem on Windows using the Windows 10 mount functions since it uses a different filesystem. (ext2 to be specific). So we'll have to take another route.

Install the Software

You'll need to install:

• win32diskimager for copying the SD image

• 7-zip for extracting the data

• ext2read for browsing and reading the Linux FS

Copy the SD Card

Create an empty file and rename it raspbian.img.

• Insert you SD card.

• Use win32diskimager to read the SD card and direct it to the newly created file.

• Press yes when prompted to overwrite the file.

After a couple of minutes you will have a copy of the Raspbian image on your PC.

Extract the Data

Install 7-zip if you don't have it already.

Open the .img file with it by right clicking and selecting open.

You'll see that you'll have at least 2 files.

In my case the .img system image has 3 files since the filesystem has been expanded.

Copy the file 1.img which represents the data on the Raspbian directory.

Save and Browse

Now right click on ext2read and run it as a system administrator.

Open the file 1.img with ext2read. You can now browse the Raspberry file system on Windows. if you want to save a directory or a file just right click on the selected directory and save it on your Windows laptop.

That's all folks.