[SOLVED] My Dilemma - Mounting A External Ext3 Formatted h/d
Afternoon all,
I have racked my brains and spent an age on this and I literally can't find a solution which I can follow so I thought I'd come to the experts. My problem 'seems' simple to solve, but has yet to work out that way, if anyone can help... I'd be eternally grateful!
My problem:
I 'had' a WesternDigital NAS, Raid1, dual 500GB, it failed, one of the drives I think (no diagnostic tools to tell me).
WD replaced my drive, however they 'upgraded' me as my product line was discontinued, so I now have a WD dual 1TB drive.
Obviously this leaves me with the useful dilemma of not being able to just pop my 'working' drive back into a Raid array and have it rebuild, so I need to get the data back.
What I have to work with:
Now I found out, through exciting means, that WD format their NAS raid array drives with Linux and my two 500Gb h/d's are formatted with EXT3.
I have my SATA drive out of the WD NAS and plugged into a ("Sharkoon QuickPort Combo" - you can see it in Amazon using that search) 3.5"USB h/d docking station and my windows workstations see the drive no problems.
Yes, you heard right, I am not a Linux o/s user and only have Windows (bleeeurgh, yes please don't kill me) o/s (XP/ Vista). However I have VMWare of Linux installed on my Vista workstation with Ubuntu, Fedora and DSL seemingly running without any problems and all the o/s see the USB drive (from what I can tell).
What I've tried
I have used DiskInternals within the Windows OS to extract 'some' data from my drives, but most annoyingly the data that has taken me the longest to build up (i.e. my TV series' and my films) are not available in this program (and believe me, I've left the drives to 'scan' file structure with this program for 12-16hrs at a time on probably a dozen seperate occasions and I still can't see the data!!
I've tried and failed to use KNOPPIX in VMWare mode (not in bootable CD - as I didn't see the difference) and whilst I got it working I couldn't see any way to get the data :confused:
Can you tell me...
How do I mount the drive within any of the above Linux o/s (or any other I can DL in ISO format and run in VMWare) so I can extract the data from it.
I can open terminal and scan the drive etc but as for finding the actual data in order to copy the files... I'm TOTALLY baffled to say the least!
REALLLLLLY appreciate any help anyone can give!!