Access RAW partition of Lacie drive from Windows

[DeadLacie]

Hello,

I have a Lacie Ethernet Disk drive that has a failed enclosure. It's out of warranty so I took the drive out and attached it to my Windows machine. It is a single 500 gb Seagate Barracuda. In reviewing many postings about similar issues, I did manage to read the disk using Ext2 File System Driver (Ext2Fsd version 0.42). Here is my problem. The Linux Ext3 partitions all show up fine and I can read them. However, the partition that houses the user data is a 464 gb RAW drive. Is there any way to get to the user data on the RAW partition, or has something bad gone wrong and I'm basically out of luck. I know that Lacie used Linux as it's mini OS and the only way to configure the drive was via the web interface. I'm wondering if there's any way to salvage the partition with all the data on it. The data is all personal stuff, my family photos and mp3's. I would hate to lose this stuff if anyone knows a way to get the data without having to send it off ($$$). Thanks.

[DeadLacie]

Hello,

I wanted to add this to my posting in hopes that it will help someone else in the same position as I was. Here is what I did to retrieve my data. Note that in my case the drive was functioning but that I just could not access the RAW partition of the drive.

1. Attach target drive to machine. In my case a 500mb Seagate SATA drive.
2. Download ISO image of UBUNTU 9.04 Desktop edition. It's open source and free (and cool).
3. Burn ISO to 80 minute CDR.
4. Set your computer to boot from CDROM.
5. Boot from the Ubuntu CD and select to boot without installing the OS. This option lets you try out Ubuntu without having to first install it - cool feature.
6. Once Ubuntu loads you will have access to all the drives on your system. At least, in my case, I had access to all my NTFS WinXP drives and the target Seagate drive that was Linux.
7. Open the partition with your data and copy all your files from that partition to one of your NTFS drives/partitions. NOTE that you will have to have enough space on your other drive(s) to copy everything over.

That was it. I now have all my data on my NTFS drives.

[hddmania]

Good Job!!! Glad to hear that you got your data back!!!