Mandriva Installer Changes NTFS Partition
I just purchased a 500 GB external Seagate HD and transferred all my data (200 GB) from my secondary internal partition to my new external drive.
Having no immediate need for the now empty internal partition I decided to install a 64-bit Linux OS, after reviewing a few I decided to go with Mandriva 2007.
I installed Linux on my internal HD, using the free space available after deleting the secondary partition. Linux installed without any problems and I rebooted into Windows Vista.
Everything works fine in Vista, except for one thing. My new 500 GB HD doesn't show up in My Computer. I tried plugging it into other computers but none of them can read the drive.
If I reboot into Linux the drive seems to operate fine; in fact, Linux shows that the external drive is still formatted in NTFS (and therefore gives me read-only access… I don’t have NTFS-G3).
I tried using Explore2fs (1.08 beta 9) with my 500 GB External Drive plugged in. Explorer2fs cannot see the drive.
I also tried working with the drive in Disk Management (in Computer Management, under Administrative Tools). Disk Management sees the drive and recognizes its capacity, but is unable to work with the partition table and therefore won’t allow me to assign a Drive Letter.
Did the Linux installer modify my HD's file-system? I have used other external drives in Linux since then and they have been unaffected. If so, are these changes reversible? Or will I have to reformat and repartition this drive? Is there another way to manually mount the drive in Windows? Is there something in NTFS partitions that could have been changed by Linux to make it unmountable by Windows?
I just bought a second 500 GB drive for copying the data to. Can I boot into a live Linux distro with NTFS-G3 and copy the data to my new drive? Or should I try it within my current Linux installation?
Any Help is Appreciated,
Zach Doty
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