Ubuntu – How to read ext4 partitions in Windows?

For starters, never try to mount one half of a RAID1 array without mdadm (the software raid you will be using on Ubuntu) being present. It handles how the two drives sync up so if you mount and alter (access times count as altering) one disk, mdadm has a real challenge to work out what's gone wrong. It could result in needing to rebuild the array or even data loss.

I was going to suggest you have a virtual machine (Ubuntu Server is very light) that mounted the partitions directly (as modern VMs can) so you're using the same version of mdadm as your install of Ubuntu. It's fairly sound logic but it's a lot more flimsey than a native install because you have a software layer between Ubuntu and the disks.

I say I was going to suggest it because I read Accessing Linux mdadm RAID+LVM volumes/data in Windows using a VM - Rewritten from somebody doing exactly what I imagined who corrupted an non-insignificant portion of their data.

I think the only safe ways to share a RAID array with Windows are:

• Keep Windows in a VM or run it on another computer
• Run the RAID array on another computer (eg dedicated NAS or another sort of server)

First of, it'd be useful to check the drive's UUID by using following command:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

In my experience, I usually mount an EXT4 formatted harddrive using the defaults, and I never experienced any errors in write permissions.

My /etc/fstab looks like the following:

UUID=004f9bfa-fb5a-438c-8a5a-dc04fa6f2d3e /media/MYCH0  auto defaults 0 0 #external hdd

if all fails, you also might try to set yourself as the owner by doing this:

sudo chown username:username /media/mountpoint

For further reference, you might want to take a look at this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1482818