Mounting an ext3/4 Linux external hard drive to OS X I just bought two 500 GB hard drives for my Mac for the purposes of backing up ten older hard drives to it. One hard drive (200 GB, pretty much full) is from my Linux machine.

I tried installing Linux via VirtualBox, but I can't seem to mount the external to my vbox installation. In either case, I get an error that it can't read the media, where I either must eject or initialize.

In Disk Utility, I can see all the hard drive partitions but I can't mount it or do anything with it.

The machine that this hard drive came from is dead now, and I don't have access to other Linux machines.
You can mount ext2/3/4-Volumes using MacFUSE with the fuse-ext2 Driver.