Reading USB-connected external HDD?

I have a HDD inside an enclosure using a USB connection. It is a SATA hard drive but I'm using it temporarily with an older Pentium computer that doesn't have SATA support. I also wanted to use USB because it's easier for portability.

Anyway, my question is whether I can use it in Windows XP. There is no icon or prompt for this drive and it doesn't display it at all. I can only use the 'safely remove hardware' option (so it lets me unplug it but not use it!) and when I go into the settings/properties, I can 'populate the volume' so that it shows it detects the drive (a Samsung). That's about all I can do so far.

I don't want to delete or reformat the drive. There is data on it. Also, the data is using a Linux disk structure so I might not be able to read it anyway. But, how come Windows can't 'see' or detect the file structure. If I can't use it, it should at least detect that it's info I can't access because it can't read the files. But, I can't even get that far.

Is there any way to get to that point? Is there a way to read the files in XP? Some sort of freeware/shareware method, perhaps?

 

When you go into the "safeley remove" thing, does it show the drive letter of the drive? E.g F: or G:

 

Explorer doesn't show filesystems as drives if it doesn't read the filesystem. If you go to Disk Management (I forget how to get there in XP but try right-clicking My Computer > Manage) then you should see the drive there.

 

Windows will not, by default, read Linux disk formats.

Here is a utility that lets you read a Linux formatted HDD.

There may be others. Google is your friend.

John

 

I've seen that before but how reliable is it? How well does it work?