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Linux destroyed my "documents drive" - Help need from noob

Hi there. Like many I decided to take the plunge into the world of Linux. I had played with Ubuntu before using a live CD. Last week I decided to 'install' openSUSE on my Vista PC. I have 3 physical HDDs, and decided to install openSUSE on one of them.
HDD1 - Vista
HDD2 - Documents
HDD3 - What I wnated to be linux.

Basically I went through the install process and something went wrong. I restarted and found that Vista did not start up - Maybe something to do with the GRUB install? openSUSE also did not start up, so I proceded to try and fix/reinstall.. I had no luck.

So I basically gave up. Formatted the Vista drive, etc.

Problem: Windows now cannot see my documents SATA drive. I have tried installing it into a PC, and in a USB dock... It seems as though Windows does not recognize the drive at all. Nothing shows up in my computer, when I plug it in via USB.

Anyone got any ideas of how I can get either Windows or an install of Linux to see this drive? Or anyone have any ideas of what happened?
Thanks.

You have provided absolutely no useful information in this post, so diagnosing your problem will be, at best, very very difficult. I suggest you read the sticky that is in this forum that tells you what information to provide in such a post.

Off the top of my head, what do you mean that OpenSUSE did not start up either? What was the error message? Be very specific.

How did you try to fix/reinstall? Be very specific.

How did you format the Vista drive? And what is etc? Be very specific.

This information is required in addition to all the things that the sticky tells you to provide.

Windows probably sees the drive as a foreign drive since you re-installed windows (windows could have easily been fixed btw).
You will need to go into Windows disk management and "Import Foreign Disk"

Start Computer management, select Storage > Disk Management, right click on the disk you have listed as Foreign, and select Import Foreign Disks

That should allow you to acces the drive again in Windows

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;222189

Quote:

Connecting disks to a new computer:

After you physically connect the disks to the new computer, click Rescan Disks on the Action menu in the Disk Management MMC utility. When you physically connect a new Dynamic disk, it is displayed in the Disk Management MMC utility as Dynamic/Foreign.

"Importing" Foreign disks:

If you move one Disk Group to another computer that contains its own Disk Group, the Disk Group you moved is marked as Foreign until you manually import it into the existing group.

To use Foreign/Dynamic disks, use the "Import Foreign Disks" operation associated with one of the disks. The manual operation lists one or more Disk Groups, identified by the name of the computer where they were created. If you expand the details on a Disk Group, it lists the locally-connected disks that are members. Click the appropriate Disk Group, and then click OK. You can then view the dialog box that lists volumes that were found in the Disk Group, along with some indication of the status of those volumes.

Foreign disk...is that some new Vista thing?

No that's been around since windows 2000

:scratch: I've never encountered that before. Maybe I just haven't done the particular things that would trigger that response from Windows.

You would never see it in the home versions of Windows because it is not supported, this 'feature' is only in 2k Pro, XP Pro, etc.. ..
and it only occurs with dynamic disks, not basic disks.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343

So it is dependant on the version of windows, as well as how you setup the disks..

I could be off on my guess as to his issue, we won't know unless he comes back and tells us go or no go. But if that drive wasn't touched during all the other processes this is the first thing I would check for.

I know I've sat there scrathing my head about a missing drive before until I checked disk manager and imported it back to the system It's not something you would run into very often, only reloading the OS, or moving the dynamic drive to a different system would cause that to appear.

Thanks for your help everyone.. And Im sorry, but I dont have any further information. I didnt really take note of any errors when installing.. I just tried to fix the openSUSE install, via the install disk.

Unfortunately, the disk is not showing up in the disk management.

Rerun the SuSE installer up to the point where you select manual partitioning. Just do this to see which partitions show up. Do you still see your second documents partition? Does yast indicate that it is an NTFS partition?

You can also enter [CTRL]-ALT-F2 to enter the terminal and enter:
fdisk -l

This will print out information on drives & partitions. Do you have 3 physical hard drives in your computer, or did you have 3 partitions on one hard drive?

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The SuSE install has an option to recover an accidently deleted partition. Is that what you tried before you re-installed Vista?