I have recently installed Ubuntu (after a lot of effort) as a secondary dual boot option. Dual booting works perfectly, but my 1.2TB data partition (NTFS) that has all my documents, photos, movies and music is no longer recognised by Windows 7.

Ubuntu can read all the files, however.

Is there a simple way for windows to realise that this is just NTFS? I could try copying the data elsewhere, reformatting and copying back, but I don't have enough disk space elsewhere to hold all the data (I'm keeping DVDs as movie backups, but I really don't want to go through ripping them all again).

I'm assuming the reason is something to do with my slightly unorthodox Linux install. For some reason live CDs (Ubuntu 9.04 and 8.10) couldn't mount my cd drive to install from (I think this is because both my HDD and DVD drive are SATA running in IDE mode, but nothing is assigned to the first IDE channel. The DVD drive can't boot when not in IDE mode, however), and there was some error I was getting when I set up an install from USB. 8.04 worked OK, but I kept on getting grub-install fatal errors (I think again because of the mapping of my HDD). I managed to get 9.04 installed however by using the minimal CD so the CD didn't need to mount, skipping using grub and using lilo instead, and then installing ubuntu-desktop component by command line later. I assume lilo must have done something when writing to the MBR that windows doesn't like.

Any help would be very much appreciated

Best bet is to load up the "Disk Management" applet in Windows 7 and see how Windows 7 sees that 1.2TB partition. * Don't make any changes though at this point, just see what Windows 7 thinks it is. *

It could be as simple as re-assigning a drive letter to the NTFS partition but we have to make sure Windows 7 still recognizes the partition.

The fact the data is still accessible and visible in Ubuntu is a good sign.

Let us know how Windows 7 sees the partition in the "Disk Management" applet and we'll go from there.

Cheers,
Kermee

Thats the first thing I looked at originally.

Windows sees the partition as Simple 'layout', Basic 'type', Healthy (Primary Partition) 'status' but doesn't recognise any filesystem. My Ubuntu partiton is exactly the same.

Using the disk management GUI the only option available is 'delete partition'.

PS: I have now backed up all vital files, so losing the partition, whilst undesirable, would not be the end of the world.

Thats the first thing I looked at originally.

Windows sees the partition as Simple 'layout', Basic 'type', Healthy (Primary Partition) 'status' but doesn't recognise any filesystem. My Ubuntu partiton is exactly the same.

Using the disk management GUI the only option available is 'delete partition'.

PS: I have now backed up all vital files, so losing the partition, whilst undesirable, would not be the end of the world.

Try doing a "Refresh" and/or "Rescan" in Disk Management. Then attempt to assign it a drive letter. That *should* fix it.

Cheers,
Kermee

I'd also try installing gparted in Ubuntu and look at the partition with it too. Perhaps you'll see something hinky.

Anyway, it sounds like you corrupted the partition table for that drive. In the worst case scenario, if you can find someone that's savvy and up-to-date on their knowledge of partition tables, it should be possible to manually edit the partition table so that Windows recognizes that partition again. Hopefully it'll be easier to solve than that.

Thanks for the replies - the issue has now been solved.

I was a bit paranoid about losing my data, so I managed to find a friend with a large enough external harddrive to back up all the files. I then recreated the partition in windows and copied the files back, but after a restart it was 'lost' again. I still couldn't assign drive letters etc in the disk manager service.

I realised that because lilo was dealing with the MBR, the windows created partitions wouldn't show up on it. The actual windows partition appeared because lilo had recognised the operating system on it. Under linux (in gparted) the data partition was flagged as 'hidden' becuase it didn't appear in the MBR. Creating the partition in Linux solved the problem and windows now recognises the partition fine.

Although linux seemed to fail to simply remove the 'hidden' flag using gparted, I would have thought that if you made some really minor edit to the partition (shrink by 5MB or something) it should go through and then leave the partition to be readable for windows.

Thanks for the replies, and I hope this helps anyone who might get a similar problem.