How can I read a linux hard disk from Windows?

Question

I have a PC with Ubuntu (I think it's 14.4). Pretty recently it completely broke down (motherboard (again)). I want to get rid of it, but on the hard disk there are a lot of photos I want to keep. I can take this hard disk out and use a Sharkoon Quickport docking station to read it from my work laptop with Windows 7. Unfortunately, it does not recognize this disk.

Is there any way to read this Linux hard disk from a windows laptop?

Solution 1

Provided your linux used an ext3 or ext4 filesystem, You could try to install the ext2fsd driver on your windows machine. That should make the disk readable. I recommend that you use this driver only to read your data from the disk not for productive use.

Solution 2

I recommend you download a LiveCD version of Linux and burn it to a CD or DVD, then boot from that. It should be able to read the Linux-formatted drive and transfer your data to a USB stick or send it somewhere over the network.

Solution 3

TotalCommander has plugin for extfs. Here is the link Total Commander Plugins

Comments

[Dmitry Grigoryev]

Last time this question was asked here, it was mirgrated to SU: superuser.com/questions/375967/…

[Admin]

This meta post had explained why this kind of question is off-topic. Answering this question requires people who use Windows system with knowledge of Linux/Unix-like filesystems, or at least has experience in managing data across both platforms.

[danidee]

This might not answer the op"s question directly, but for me it's the easiest and the best provided the op just wants access to his photos and copy them out

[cylgalad]

I'd advise against using such a driver at all. It's ext2-only mostly and could BSOD.

[cylgalad]

Using a liveCD (or better a liveUSB) is definitively the way to go. If it has ntfs-3g you can easily copy the files directly to the Windows hard-drive.

[Ruluhulu]

thanx, I'll give this a try and keep you informed

[Thawn]

The driver explicitly supports ext3 and ext4. However, it disables journalling which is one of the key features distinguishing ext3 and ext4 from ext2. This is why I recommended to use the driver only for reading data, because it is less robust against interrupted write operations.

[cylgalad]

And it's prone to BSOD and to mess things up...

[Thawn]

@cylgalad: Have you actually experienced problems with the driver? I have been running the driver on my private laptop for years without problems.