Locally mounting physical Mac OS X drives/volumes in a Windows machine?

March 30, 2005 2:55 PM

Locally mounting physical Mac OS X drives/volumes in a Windows machine?

For a number of nearly inexplicable reasons, I need to mount a OS X formatted drive in a Windows 98 box to back up most of a 40g HD. The Mac it came from is a usb 1.1 box. USB is erroring constantly, FireWire seems to be nonfunctional with my FW enclosures. If I had the time I would put it on the LAN and let it all trickle over during the next few days, but the computer has to be back where it came from tommorow.

For all my efforts, my desk and workspace looks something like this a the moment - with an additional three computers strewn about and not a small number of screws. Despite a small amount of non-figurative or metaphorical blood, the drive from that monstrosity of engineering is ready to go, save for that pesky file system compatibility issue.

There's this software, but their trial download seems like it might be broken. (on multiple machines, patched and updated, one a fresh install.)

Does anyone know of another open source, trialware, or freeware solution to mount and access this highly troublesome disk?

posted by loquacious to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Sounds like a job for Knoppix.

There are plenty of articles on data transfer and system recovery using Knoppix.
posted by furtive at 3:25 PM on March 30, 2005

I'm still considering that - I have several knoppix bootables laying around - but the problem with that is that the CD drive is out of the windows box in question to make room for the third hard drive, and inexplicably the windows box I'm working with doesn't have a real 80-pin dual channel ribbon on IDE #2, and I have no others in the house.

I might have to copy a bootable knoppix partition to one of the drives.
posted by loquacious at 3:32 PM on March 30, 2005

get a hard drive enclosure, get knoppix, stick the drive in the enclosure, and have at it.
posted by angry modem at 4:28 PM on March 30, 2005

I just tried that as well, after thinking about it for a moment. Knoppix sees the drive and enclosure and USB chain just fine, but isn't mounting the filesystem.

I think I'm just going to have to hunker down, rebuild and put the eMac on the 100bt segment of the house LAN (instead of USB enclosure+spare drive) and let it trickle through.

This is, of course, all my fault. I shouldn't have taken the drive out; but the OS and/or hardware are acting really flaky and not transferring reliably on the USB.
posted by loquacious at 5:03 PM on March 30, 2005