Mount NLSU2 EXT3 drives in WIndows 7

Linksys NLSU2

My trusty Linksys NLSU2 NAS device finally gave out the other week after eight years of faultless performance. It has fulfilled a number of tasks these years, for the last three functioning as a dedicated media store.

When it failed the NLSU2 would give access to the files for 3-5 minutes and reset itself to the factory default IP setting and disable SMB. No amount of reconfiguring and rebooting made any difference.

I routinely backup the media across the wire to a 1TB portable 2.5" disk. When I plugged the portable disk in this time I got the dreaded: click, click, click, as the drive head struggled and failed to access the disk. Lots of trials later on various machines and the backup disk joined the NLSU2 in the skip queue. I now had no access to any of my media.

Ripping all my DVD's again was very low on my list of priorities, so I was faced with a need to get the data off the drives that had been plugged into the NLSU2. This turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it would be.

The NLSU2 creates three partitions on the main attached disk. Two 118Mb system partitions and a main EXT3 partition to store and share your data. I tried a few different utilities for accessing the EXT3 file system with the disk plugged into the USB port of my Windows 7 PC. The few that even ran on W7 and did read the EXT3 file system couldn't actually copy off any files.

Eventually I came across this excellent post conveniently titled MOUNT EXT4, EXT3 OR EXT2 PARTITIONS IN WINDOWS 7 OR XP, which describes downloading, installing and using a utility called EXT2FSD - code written by Bo Branten and supplied by Sourceforge.net.

I got the same error the blog author mentioned but a post install reboot solved it. You need to remember assigning a Drive to a disk won't work, you need to assign the drive letter to the bigger EXT3 partition on the disk, which may be listed to the bottom of the utility screen. The letter took a few seconds to assign and then the disk and all its contents appeared as a natural extension of windows. I immediately backed them up.

Thank you to the post author over at WEB UPD8, Bo Branten and Sourceforge.