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

What exactly does Disk Management say about the drive, e.g. does it recognize the NTFS partition as such?

Generally, I think it's probably a bad idea to leave any usb drive connected and on during any OS install, whether it be windows or linux. It's possible that there was some minor filesystem corruption which windows is more sensitive to. You probably can't run chkdisk on a usb drive but you can try that from within windows. Also, try recycling power to the usb drive(pull the plug on the power supply) and try a different usb port. It may reinitialize and be properly detected in windows.

As for copying over to a second drive, if you don't have single files over 4GB in size, I'd leave the second external partitioned FAT32 which is how they all come. It will greatly simplify things. Unfortunately FAT32 will not accept any single file larger than 4GB.