I have recently installed Linux onto a second hard-drive in my PC.
The Linux installation appears to be fine but Windows shows the new hard-drive as an unformatted 'D:' drive. Any ideas on how to hide the drive from Windows so that I don't accidently reformat it and loose my Linux installation.

The Linux distro is Mandrake 9.2, Windows is ME.

Thanks,
Jonah

Get "TweakUI" for Windows ME/98. It's downloadable for free from Microsoft.

When you have it installed, open your control panel and double click on the "TweakUI" icon in there and go to the "My Computer" tab.

You will be able to un-check your "D" drive letter from in there. That way it won't even appear in Explorer as a part of your computer as far as Windows is concerned.

I did exactly the same thing on my Windows 2000 installation on the machine I dual-boot Slackware on.


EDIT

Here's a link to TweakUI on Microsoft's site for ya.

Thanks for that suggestion and it certainly solves the accidental formatting issue. Still got an associated problem though.
My primary disk is split into two partitions: one for the Windows O/S installation and the other for applications and data. This used to be C: and D: in Windows. When I added the second drive it appeared as a new D: drive pushing my applications partition onto E:. Using TweakUI to hide the D: drive has now left me with C: and E:.
As the second partition was seen as D: when I installed applications on it the Windows registry still thinks they are installed on D: and so nothing now works.
When I installed a similar configuration on a previous PC Windows completely ignored the second (Linux) drive and reported the two partitions of the primary drive as C: and D:. Its this state of things that I'm trying to get back to.

Thanks,
Jonah

Ah, I get what you're saying.

I'm not really sure what you can do about that. In fact, I might be finding myself in a similar situation when I finally get around to repartitioning my laptop.

I'll let you know what I figure out when I run across that... or if you figure something out first, do post it. We might both be screwed on that level.

what is likely to have happened is that during the paritioning of the system the file system was cerated successfully but the entry in the partition table was not changed, or set correctly. in linux use a program like fdisk or cfdisk, and more than likely you'll find that your partition is still set at a fat32 partition or whatever it was. change this flag to the appropriate type (type 0x83) and windows will no longer show it.