What I don't have is the knowledge of how to access an external drive formatted with the ext file system from a Mac. I have the hardware that's needed to do this. The YouTube video shows that being done on a PC running Ubuntu I don't have one of those handy. I would need to pull the drive from it's current enclosure (simple enough), mount it in a spare drive enclosure (I have one), then one simply plugs that drive (enclosure) via standard USB cable into a machine that can read a drive formatted with the ext file system. I have been unable to see the drive if I just plug it in to my router via ethernet - I assume I need either the iOmega utility or some other way to ping the network.Īs an alternative to jumping through those hoops, I've found a YouTube video that suggests one way to access files on these drives is to mount it on a machine running Ubuntu Linux (since that's apparently what runs the NAS server and it's formatted using the ext file system). I don't believe that I can simply plug in a USB cable to access the drive (it would require a male-to-male USB cable which seems rare). The drive enclosure has an ethernet port, and a female USB port. This drive was sold as a NAS server (and was used by me for a while as one), but it's old, hasn't been used in years, and came with some odd 'home network server' utility (from Iomega) which allowed access, but seems to needlessly complicate things. I have an old external hard drive that I believe is probably formatted in some variant of the 'ext' file system (ext2, ext3, ext4, etc.) which I am told is the standard file system used by Ubuntu Linux.

Is there a Mac utility required to do this? Can it be done by invoking some Unix commands via the Terminal app? I'm wondering if/how I can access files on a Linux-formatted external hard drive directly from my Mac.

View files on mac from linux usb