Reading drive from iOS machine on Windows?

Buddy's laptop died. I am trying to get his data for him. I hooked the drive up to my machine - it spins, Windows identifies it , driver installed. It doesn't show up in Explorer.

In Disk Manager it is there, showing its partitions, says it's healthy and Online, but there are no drive letters. Right clicking a partition brings up a context menu with everything greyed out. Right clicking the drive brings up a mostly greyed out context menu but I can select Properties. The proprties window does have info about the drive, so Windows is reading it to a degree.

I tried http://hfsexplorer.en.softonic.com/ but it didn't detect the drive and I wasn't able to direct it there as there are no drive letters.

Is there some trick, or piece of software to read this? Should I boot to Ubuntu and try from there? I am hesitant for that because I don't know how to use Linux as well, also my file recovery software (if I end up needing it) is for Windows.

Any tips will be appreciated. Thanks

 

Greetings, Jungalist...

Booting to a Linux distro might be your best bet. Is your Ubuntu on a CD/DVD? If so, running it from a live environment would be the safest route. You might then be able to transfer any important data to a flash drive.

 

Paragon has a tool for that
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/

 

Thank you both for the input. I will try your suggestions.