I made partition during an installation of Ubuntu and never named it. So the
problem is that now I cannot access or see the partition in Windows; while it
does remain available in Ubuntu. Can you tell me how to access it in Windows
7?
In this excerpt from
Answercast #11, I walk through the steps needed to find a lost partition on
a drive and discover if it can be viewed in Windows.
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Ubuntu partition in Windows
Maybe.
My guess is that the partition is completely visible in Windows Disk Manager
as a partition in use. Whether or not it can see its contents will depend on a
couple of things.
Find the partition
Let’s start by right-clicking on Computer (the thing that used to be “My
Computer” in Windows XP) and click on Manage.
Once the management console opens up, click on Disk Manager and you should see, on the right-hand pane, a listing of all of the partitions and all of the
disks that Windows sees. Chances are your Ubuntu partition will be there except
it simply won’t have a drive letter assigned to it.
You could right-click on it and assign it a drive letter right there.
Linux disk formats
Now, one of the things to realize is that Ubuntu (in fact, all Linux
softwares) support several different disk formatting options that Windows does
not support. In fact, the default disk format, in most versions of Linux, is
not a format that Windows supports natively.
You won’t be able to see the contents of that drive unless it had been
formatted as either FAT32 or NTFS. Any of the native Linux file systems (such
as, I think, EXT or EXT3 and several others) simply don’t work. But you should
be able to at least see the partition and acknowledge that it exists in Windows
simply by looking at that drive manager.
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There are EXT filesystem drivers available for Windows. One example is at http://www.ext2fsd.com/ and another is at http://ext2read.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/ext2read-22-released-now-with-lvm2-and.html. I’ve used one of these or similar with an EXT3 file system (can’t remember which one now) and had no problems.
The way I get around this problem is to create a FAT32 partition and use it for sharing files between operating systems, since Windows and Linux both support FAT32 perfectly. If you have very large files, you can use NTFS for the sharing partition. NTFS is not perfectly supported in Linux, but you can add the support (if needed by your distro) and access the NTFS partition in both Linux and Windows.