Microsoft also says it's investigating user reports of the latest Windows 10 2004 security patch breaking WSL 2.

Can Windows read ext4? Yes, it can, but only using third-party freeware! They allow you to read Ext4 in Windows 11/10 & copy files from Linux to Windows.

DiskInternals Linux Reader lets you read files from Ex2/3/4, UFS2, HFS and ReiserFS/4 Linux file systems which are not natively supported on Windows 11/10.

XFS's failure modes on less-than-perfectly-reliable systems are a lot more annoying and visible than those on ext [34]. When a machine goes down hard, XFS is apt to leave you with a bunch of files ...

Almost every bit of data needed to boot and run a Linux system is stored in a filesystem. Learn more about some commonly used Linux filesystem types.