Windows Can't See Ubuntu Hard Drive

[AjitPal]

I will try to describe my problem as simple as i can. I have a desktop computer with two hard drives. Both are Sata HDD with 250GB Storage. One drive is having Windows XP installed on NTFS Partition with a FAT32 recovery partition. The second hard drive is having Ubuntu 8.04 AMD64 installed on an EXT3 partition with a 5GB swap partition. Now the problem is when i boot into Windows XP, it wont see the Ubuntu Hard Drive. I think it should show up because i have installed a working EXT driver for Windows that I have regularly used with my EXT3 external hard drive.

When i log in to Ubuntu, it is able to see the windows NTFS Partition fine, but windows cannot see. Can anybody please tell me how can i make Windows to show up the partitions on the Ubuntu drive? Many thanks.

[Borgnine]

Yeah, there are some limitations in windows. Its ext driver will not recognize the drive if there will be even a small damage to the ext2/3 file system. So it might be worth while to do force a file check on this drive. As far as FAT is concerned, i have no idea.

[agarwalm11]

Hello AjitPal. you should try over at comp.os.linux.misc. Apart from this i will suggest you to try running Windows out of a virtual window instead of dual boot. That way you get the power of Linux: speed, stability, the ability to back everything up, a journalism file system, etc.. Furthermore you will also be able to run those programs that do not run under Linux or Wine in the virtual Windows machine.

[AjitPal]

Thanks for the help buddy. I did several routine disc checks with Ubuntu at startup but dint found any problem. I also did fsck from a boot disc and there were no errors found. But still my Windows cannot see the partition in spite of the fact that the disc is listed as functioning in the Device Manager. Any other help please.

[Hawkin's]

Just right click My Computer, Click Manage, Click Disk Management from the left pane and see if it is sharing a drive letter with another drive. If yes, then is an option to change the drive letter. I have faced such similar problems many times with my USB drivers which walk all over network drive letters. I guess this is happening with you as well.

[AjitPal]

I appreciate your help buddy but that too dint helped. I am not even able to change the drive letters for either partition on the second drive. You can see the screenshots here:
http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/4...8225935uw4.jpg
http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/6...8225910yz0.jpg

[shawntae]

How to use linux swap partition as windows swap file:

• Go to the website below, and download the swapfs zip file to a windows accessible folder:http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/
• Write down the location of your linux swap partition (for example, mine is the 4th partition on the first drive; /dev/hda4 or (hd0,4). hda=hd0, hdb=hd2, etc... If your drive is sdaX, check your bios settings to determine which drive it is.(Do not include extended partitions, only primary and logical).
• Extract the contents of the zip file to its own folder, and open up the file "swapfs.reg" for editing, changing the two lines that read "\\Device\\Harddisk0\\Partition1" to the location of your linux swap partition (in my case "\\Device\\Harddisk0\\Partition4").
• Copy the driver (swapfs.sys) to "%systemroot%\system32\drivers\".
• Reboot, and verify you swap settings under system settings, in the control panel (you may have to turn off the old paging file manually).
• Enjoy the extra disk space!