Damnable hard drive won't show up in Explorer part 2 (About Someone Else)

Seattle Thread

So a friend of mine had her laptop go tits-up recently, and like a fool I volunteered to pull the hard drive and retrieve her data. Upon plugging it onto the unused IDE channel on my desktop (I do have a converter) Windows Explorer refuses to acknowledge its existence.

Disk Management shows that there is a drive there, but it has no volume information and I can't assign it a drive letter. I'm not about to format the thing, as it would most certainly defeat my entire purpose, but formatting is the only thing it's letting me do with it at this point.

Then I recalled that her computer ran on some version of Linux. Unfortunately I know little about it. Does Linux use a different formatting system besides FAT/NTSC? I'm guessing so, and I'm also guessing that would be the root of the problem.

And if that's the case, well... is there any way to get this data over to my own drive? I do have a Knoppix CD lying around here, if booting onto that might work. Would transferring the data via Knoppix still allow the data to be read via XP? Is there another way to transfer the data over?

bombardier

Yeah if it's a Linux drive you're not going to be able to read that from Windows.

However, you can give this method a try: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/use-ubuntu-live-cd-to-backup-files-from-your-dead-windows-computer/

Basically burn an Ubuntu CD, boot off of it, and it can read the Linux drive and then you can do whatever with the files.

ecco the dolphin

Actually, you could try Explore2fs.

Reads ext2/ext3 partitions from within Windows (ext2/ext3 are the filesystems that Linux typically uses, as opposed to FAT/NTFS for Windows) and lets you export files from them.

Direct download link here.

Seattle Thread

Thanks mate, Explore2fs worked swimmingly.

Now I'm having an additional problem. After disconnecting her hard drive and powering everything back up, my drive is now "Corrupted and Unreadable." Fortunately there's nothing but music and a few old backups on there, but I'd still rather go without formatting if I can help it. Any advice?