My laptop died. I have a hd that I pulled formatted with multiple primary and logical partitions. (NTFS, ext3, ext4, and FAT32)

I tried reading drive after putting it in docking station over USB on osx 10.6.8.

I am able to see only the NTFS partition in the terminal.


What steps would I need to take to read(and hopefully write) to all partitions from osx 10.6.8. I read of 3rd party drivers, though not rated very well.

No idea, mainly because you're using OSX, which is not Linux. If all you have to work with is OSX, it would be far better to ask such a question on an OSX forum, where they may have some ideas about disk utilities.

I know nothing about Macs, so I can only suggest a workaround that I would probably try myself. I quickly learned that a OSX can natively read/write FAT32 and exFAT drives. I would buy (or borrow) an external HDD large enough to hold all of the data and format it to one of those filesystems. FAT32 has a single file size limit of 4GB and a partition limit of 8TB, but I would probably use that if the source drive fits within those limits. Since Linux reads all the filesystems on your source, boot on a live Linux DVD/USB (or get a Linux friend to help) so you can make the disk-to-disk copy to create your permanent archive. If you borrowed the HDD, then format your original source to FAT32/exFAT and copy back again.

The reason I'd pick FAT32 is that you might have to take some extra steps for Linux to support exFAT, but I would think it would still be easier than getting OSX to support the variety of what you have to deal with. The biggest downside may be that the copy operation could take a very long time if you have a large drive.

Anyway, just my two cents. Good luck!

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OSX is a version of FreeBSD, which I think can only read ext2 Linux partitions.
You will be better off using a live Linux distro on another machine.

You need to use a Linux live CD and mount the partition that way.

If things are really bad, hopefully the live CD has testdisk handy: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

If a disk is suspect, you really should be trying to analyse it connected directly to a disk controller and not via a USB caddy. You want as few interfaces between you and the disk as is possible since each connection could introduce a discrepancy.