How to format pendrive from fat32 to ext3 in windows7?

Question

I am trying to make a live USB of OPHCRACK, and I tried to boot from a fat32 pendrive. But after making a live USB, it wouldn't boot. After searching awhile, I came to understand that ophcrack will not work in a fat32 pendrive and that we have to convert it into ext3.

I am having a hard time finding a method or software which can be used to convert fat32 pendrive to ext3 in windows 7. Can you suggest any method or software for this purpose?

Solution 1

Easus Partition Manager can achieve such a task, you can grab it for free if you keep it for personnal home use.

Solution 2

I am not aware of any utility that supports formatting in extN in Windows. The most comprehensive utility I know is Paragon ExtFS for Windows, but it is not a formatter.

I think the best you can do is to use Linux to do that. You may use Linux on a diffrent pc, or you can set up a Virtual Machine on your Windows host with, say VirtualBox, and use your virtual Linux machine to format the pen drive.

Solution 3

You can use the free tool mke2fs for Windows from the "Ext2 File System Driver for Windows" project.

Inside the zip (v0.02 at this moment) you have one .exe file inside the Release folder.

It's an executable you can run on windows using a command line with a simple syntax like:

Mke2fs -b 4096 -L Label x:

Label will be the label of the partition you want to set. And X: it's the unit on your windows you want to convert to ext2

Solution 4

You can create a booting flash drive running ophcrack with Unetbootin, ophcrack is officially supported.

Additionally I think it isn't possible to convert fat32 to ext3 and I'm also pretty sure that ophcrack can boot from fat32 because normally most live systems have their actual filesystem inside a squashfs file on the boot medium and most linux kernels work fine with fat32 (especially those that have to read password hashes that are potentially stored on a fat32 filesystem).

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Comments

[Sam Liao]

I don't think there are hardware boot from ext3 on usb directly. Check pendrivelinux.com/creating-a-bootable-usb-ophcrack

[Ramhound]

Boot into a Live Linux environment. Windows does not have EXT3 support. The best idea is use an OS that has native support

[CoveGeek]

For more information on how to use the mke2fs utility [thegeekstuff.com/2013/01/mke2fs-examples/] I am using this utility right now to format a 320GB USB HDD to ext3. It also let me open the HDD as ext3 within windows :o