I have a FAT32 partition set up in hopes of sharing it between dual-boot Linux and WindowsXP systems.

The partition initially works fine in windows; but if I ever at all write to the partition while running Linux, windows later refuses to access it.

I rarely use windows, but from what I have read this setup should work fine. Anybody know what's wrong?

first of all, are you booting windows every time? or are you hibernating? I had this problem when I hibernated windows. But rebooting windows fixed it. Also, what's the fstab entry?

No, not hibernating. I'm booting every time.

The fstab entry is:
I have done some more hunting and found that every time windows boots it is setting the partition to hidden. I can remove the hidden flag while in Linux, but windows just adds it again at the next boot.

hmmm....Your fstab entry looks ok. I'm not really sure then....Sorry I can't be of more help. It might be a windows problem, and have nothing to do with linux, but I'm not sure.

I use FAT32 partition with win2000 and Linux with no issues.

Note that there are 2 kinds of FAT32---I use LBA (hex code C)

Post the output of fdisk p command to see if that gives an clues---eg, there are a bunch of "hidden" options which Linux might ignore but Windows would find significant.

Yes, I use LBA as well.

Well, I have solved the problem....

I use the GAG bootloader on the mbr (http://gag.sourceforge.net/). One of its "features" is that it hides the primary partitions so you can have multiple versions of DOS insalled; and as a result, GAG was hiding my shared partition.

I have never had GAG do that before because I have always made the shared partition logical (placed it inside an extended partition).

I don't suppose there are many other GAG users out there, but if this ever happens to any of them... here is the answer!

Thanks for the help guys, if for nothing other than getting my brain working.


Edit: For those who may stumble across this later, there are lots of ways to unhide a partition. Both the GRUB and LILO bootloaders can unhide partitions, as well as the parted and fdisk partition tools and more. If you use GAG, just don't expect to use it and be able to access your primary partitions from windows (Linux isn't so picky).