Thanks for the tip!!

Just a FYI to anyone else who might read this. Unlike Linux, Windows does not support the use of multiple partitions on removable drives. If the USB drive has more than one partition, Windows detects it as fixed drive. (Plus, it took out my USB CD-ROM driver for some reason). AFAIK this is true for all versions of Windows. It appears I can still use the drive, but have no way to "safely remove hardware" other than by shutting down the PC.

Windows does not include drivers to be able to see Linux file systems native because the code for these drivers is open source and the windows kernel is closed source. They would have to modify there license to allow it. This however does not exclude them from making a open source driver that could be loaded later like a power toy or something. I suspect if more companies start complaining about not being able to use windows servers to mount recovered Linux drives they may come out with something. BTW windows has a 3rd party Linux driver that works with ext2 and ext3 (mounted as ext2) I find this driver very flaky at times tho and unreliable. NTFS has like a 2 or 3 terabyte file size limit fat32 has the 2gig limit. I believe it may have been patched to allow larger files but I don't remember, its been far too long since I have done MS support

Sorry.. I wasn't clear. ANY removable drive that has more than one partition will be seen as fixed (not removable). It does not matter what the partitions are formatted as.* Of course, my ext3 partition is not visible nor accessible in Windows, but Windows still knows there is more than just the FAT32 partition and I can see this in Windows Disk Management. I can still use my FAT partition just fine.

*This would apply even if I had simply two FAT32 partitions, or one FAT32 and one NTFS, or one FAT32 and one hidden boot partition - the drive would be detected as fixed and not removable.

Windows cannot handle more that one partition on a removable device.