How to Read a Raspberry Pi SD Card on Windows (Free Option)

When you plug a Raspberry Pi SD card into Windows, it will only show one partition (the /boot partition), but your user files aren’t there. Windows can’t read Linux partitions in the file explorer because it’s not a format supported natively. In this article, I’ll show you how to fix this.

On Windows, an application like “Linux Reader” is required to read partitions formatted on Linux systems. After installing the software, all partitions are accessible from this tool, even “rootfs” from the Raspberry Pi SD card.

There are probably alternative solutions, but most of them are paid, so I’ll show you what I have set up to access my Raspberry Pi files for free on Windows. Let’s start with a bit of theory, and I’ll then give you the step-by-step process.

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How Do I Connect a Raspberry Pi SD Card to My PC?

You can connect your Raspberry Pi SD card to your computer, by inserting it into the SD card reader if one is available. An SD adapter is generally required to let your microSD card fit the slot. If your PC doesn’t have a built-in reader, you can insert a USB SD card reader instead.

Once the SD card is inserted, Windows will generally detect the SD card, and ask you to format it. This is default Windows behavior, but you don’t have to format!

If you just want to install a new operating system on your Raspberry Pi, you can use Raspberry Pi Imager (I have a full guide about this here), or keep reading to learn how to read the files on it.

Bonus tip: If the terminal still feels confusing, I made a simple cheat sheet with 74 commands explained in plain English. You can grab it here for free..

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Can you read a Raspberry Pi SD card on Windows?

Windows supports NTFS, FAT, FAT32 and exFAT file system partitions by default.
However, the Raspberry Pi’s user partition is another format: extFS. So, reading a Raspberry Pi SD card is not recognized on Windows without a third-party application.

If you open the disk manager on Windows with your micro-SD card plugged in, you’ll see something like this:

The first line is my hard drive with Windows installed on it.
The second line is my Raspberry Pi SD card, with two partitions:

• The first one, named “boot” uses a FAT32 filesystem, so Windows can read it. It’ll be mounted automatically when you plug in the SD card. You can see the files on it (and can put some too, like for a headless setup explained here). But it’s a tiny partition, so you can’t really use it to store your personal files.
• The second partition, the root partition, uses an ext4 filesystem. It takes up most of the SD card and is the user partition that contains a typical Linux file system (/home, /var, etc.).
  But as mentioned, Windows can’t read it, so it won’t appear in your file explorer.

Now, that I’ve explained the issue and the concepts behind it, let’s learn how to access the files on the root partition.

Access Raspberry Pi OS Files on Windows

A free tool, named “Linux Reader” can be installed on Windows to get access to all Linux partitions (for example, ext2/3/4, UFS, HFS and ReiserFS systems are supported).

As an example use case, I recently forgot to copy screenshots from my Raspberry Pi to my computer before shutting everything down and disconnecting it. So, I wanted a way to get the files from the Raspberry Pi onto my laptop.

I used this method and it worked, but it doesn’t mean it’s the “best” solution.
It is, however, free and easy.

Install Linux Reader

Here’s how to install Linux Reader on Windows:

• Visit the DiskInternals site.
• Click “GET IT FREE” to download the application.
• Double click the downloaded file to install Linux Reader.

I came across many other apps that promised to do this task, but most of them required a commercial license. As my goal was to use it once, I didn’t want to pay for dedicated software.

But if you’re looking to use something regularly, and maybe if you need to write to the SD card from Windows, a paid version might make sense. It’s up to you.

Copy Raspberry Pi Files with Linux Reader

Here’s how to access the files from your Raspberry Pi SD card with Linux Reader:

• Open the application from the main menu.
• The main screen looks like this:
  
• You can see all your partitions, including the two partitions from the SD card.
  The one that interests us is the “rootfs” partition.
  Right-click on it, and select “Open partition”.
• You’ll get access to all the folders on the root partition, something like:
  
  These are the same folders you can see under “/” on Raspberry Pi OS.
  Use this explorer to find the files you’re looking for (maybe under /home/<username>).
• Once you have located the files you want, right-click, and choose “Save”:
  
  With some files, the tool will even give you a preview (like for this PDF):
  

When you click on “Save”, a new wizard appears and guides you to save the files on your PC.

• You first need to choose what you want to do with the files:
  
• Then, it gives options to complete the task.
  For example, if you keep “Save files”, you can choose the destination directory:
  
• Follow the next steps until the files are copied to your main drive:
  

That’s what I did to recover my screenshots and also camera test pictures, and it worked very well, so I wanted to share this tip with you. I hope it helps you out.

I understand that if you want something more powerful, like editing files on the SD card directly or mounting the partition, this won’t be enough. But in this case, you can always get the paid version that includes these features.

I guess you can do this with Linux on your computer or another Raspberry Pi, or even with a virtual machine, but it was too complicated in my case, I just wanted a quick way to get my files :-).