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Suddenly, my old Buffalo LinkStation network storage at home crashed, and of course there was some data on there I had not recently backed up…so I took it apart (if you ever disassemble a LinkStation, note that they think it’s funny to hide a screw behind the model sticker - I found this out the hard way after a lot of cursing…) and pulled out the harddrive. After sticking it into a USB enclosure, I was happy to hear it spin up….but disappointed to get an error from my Mac telling me it could not mount the disk (it’s a Linux native partition that Mac OS X cannot mount). So what do you do??

I ended up finding UFS Explorer on the web. It’s software from a Ukrainian company called SysDevSoftware, and they should learn how to do a website that’s at least nearly as good as their software. However, running it on Windows (with Parallels by SWSoft, a company founded by a Russian entrepreneur….) the trial version quickly identified the Linux partition on my drive and I was able to read files from it. So I went on and spent the $22 in order to buy a license (”standard access” version) which allows you to actually copy all the files off the mounted disk. It works like a charm…the only drawback is that it seems slow, but that may be due to my Parallels setup.

UFS Explorer also seems to have disk recovery functionality, so I suggest trying it out next time you run into disk trouble…