Hi,

I have a dual boot setup with Win XP and Ubuntu, each on their own partition, and I have always been able to access and modify files on my Ubuntu partition from XP using Ext2 IFS.

All of a sudden I am unable to do this - now I receive the message "The disk in drive L is not formatted, do you want to format it now?" whenever I click on my linux drive (the drive still shows up in win explorer).

I can only think this must be something to do with upgrading my Ubuntu to 9.10 Karmic, as nothing else has changed on my pc.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is there anything I can do to regain access?
I am aware of another program Disk Internals Linux Reader, but this won't let me modify linux files.

Thanks

Is the linux drive in ext2 (or 3) format? Did the install process change the drive format to something else, like ReiserFS or ext4 perhaps? In linux type 'mount' on its own and see what your partitions' types are.

I had a similar issue a while back.

If I remember correctly, the problem is that newer Linux distros tend to use an inode size of 256 on their partitions. Ext2 IFS is not able to read partitions which have an inode size higher than 128, so it can't read it. The utility from Disk Internals can read these partitions, however, as you mentioned, it is read-only.

I'm not sure if there is a way to enable write support with the Disk Internals utility. If not, you will have to reformat your partition with a smaller inode size. I'm not sure how to go about this. When I found this out I just gave up and stuck with the read-only access I got from Disk Internals.

Hope that helps at least a little.

My Linux drive is in ext3. I don't know if the installer did something to it or not.
Output of mount was:

/dev/sdb1 on / type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
none on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
none on /var/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
/dev/sda1 on /media/sda1 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)
/dev/sda5 on /media/sda5 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)
/dev/sda6 on /media/sda6 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)
/dev/sdb5 on /media/sdb5 type vfat (rw,utf8,umask=007,gid=46)
/dev/sdb6 on /media/sdb6 type vfat (rw,utf8,umask=007,gid=46)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
...