To fill in a little more background:
Over a year ago, I think I originally re-formatted the USB drive to Ext3, using Easeus Partition Master Free. Partition Master does clearly recognize the USB disk as Ext3 and does neatly list every Folder and every individual file in a very Windows-like way.
I also have Disk Internals “Linux Reader” installed, in the hope that it could copy files from the USB Ext3 drive to a PC for archiving. Linux Reader sees the drive as “Linux Ext Volume 1” with a file system of “Linux Ext”. Double clicking this drive then produces a yellow Folder Icon labelled “Linux Ext Volume 1 – empty” and a line statement that “There are no recoverable files in this folder“
It was at that point I gave up trying to get the files to a PC and started to try to at least reorganize the USB drive into Folders. So far, I am failing at that too!
I do hope there is a way out of this, either transferring to a PC (highy preferable) or at least in reorganizing the USB drive for easier reference.