In desparate need of help. Was running Open Suse 10.2 as a file server ... had 24GB stored. The OS got corrupted somehow. To make a long story short, I decided to get rid of the Linux since I am not well versed at all with it. In order to recover my files, I setup a 2nd hard drive and installed the OS since I could not get the original drive to boot. Once the OS was installed, I accessed my files on the original drive and saved them to an external usb hard drive which I had been using for backup. I had formated this drive to ext3 using partition magic. Now I have installed windows to replace linux and cannot access the usb drive to migrate my files back. Partition Magic sees the drive but will not allow me to change from ext3 back to ntfs or fat. Windows does not see the drive at all. Have tried a couple different tools supposedly designed for this but with no success. Any help please would be appreciated. Have to have this up and running with access to files by morning!

There is a ex2fs plugin for Total Commander to read ext2, ext3 and reiser Linux partitions. Google for it.

I have tried 2 different versions of the ex2f programs and they have done nothing for me. I know the data is there ... I wathced as it backed up. Is there any way to convert from ext3 to ntfs so that the files are still readable?

Boot from a live CD. Mount your USB drive. Mount another USB drive which is formatted with FAT, copy.

Plug the usb drive in a linux computer and see if you can see the data. if you can, just copy it over to a fat drive.

explore2fs-1.07 will let you see the Linux partition and to view files and you can copy them into the Windoze partition. But you might have to do that once by one.