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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Windows can't read most common filesystems is indeed a sheer idiocy, most probably caused by Microsoft's arrogance and assumption that anything else doesn't worth attention since they'll dominate the world forever.

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Fun story: I was trying to get Windows 8 and Linux Mint to dual boot before Christmas, and to use the Windows 8 bootloader (what can I say, it's pretty). Now, the Windows 8 bootloader is a mini-OS itself, containing a fairly sophisticated recovery environment; as such, it needs its own NTFS-formatted partition. Now (and this took me about half a dozen re-installs of Windows and Linux to figure out) if you install Windows 8 on the first partition of your hard drive, it will create a small bootloader partition in front of the Windows partition, and everything will be great. If, however, you install it after say, your Linux partition, the Windows installer will say "oh, look, a big partition for me to dump my bootloader, I don't understand what's on it, so it can't be important", and re-format your ext Linux partition as NTFS (then, when you go back and re-install Linux, Windows is of course unbootable, because you overwrote its bootloader, so even the option of "okay, let's just stick to GRUB" doesn't work). I understand Microsoft not supporting alternative OS's in their bootloader, that's their prerogative, but destructive (and un-warned) reformats of existing partitions as part of the installer? That's just unprofessional.

It'd guess it's not just unprofessional, but is an evil prank on their part.

Like the old joke from the Windows 95 source code says:

    if(first_time_installation)
    {
       make_50_megabyte_swapfile();
       do_nothing_loop();
       totally_screw_up_HPFS_file_system();
       search_and_destroy_the_rest_of_OS_2();
       hang_system();
    }

http://fsinfo.noone.org/~abe/Windoof/win95.c

Not really, the thing is that implementations for accessing said file systems are under a GPL license. In order to integrate them to Windows, they'd have to re-implement from scratch which could lead to a ton of bugs and then they'd have to officially support all of those file systems.

Definitely not worth it from MSFTs perspective.

They could implement it for the sake of interoperability. Surely it doesn't worth it from MS perspective since they didn't do it. But the reason is not because they don't have resources or it's some extremely hard problem to tackle. The reason is that they don't care about interoperability until forced. That's their whole approach.

Seriously, how big of a use case do you think it is that someone has a drive formatted with some FreeBSD filesystem which they want use in Windows?

How hard is it to just copy the data over a network or mount the image in a VM running its native OS?

Note that support for the .iso filesystem was recently added.

Copy 2TB JSF partition over network sounds like something I wouldn't want to do... An easier solution is to just get a Live Linux distro, and another 2TB NTFS partition, and copy over the data... if you have another 2TB drive.

I know the world looks different when you're the server admin who has to deal with it, but how often does such a partition end up on a Windows server in the first place?

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