Cannot access partition after installing Ubuntu

Question

I have a laptop with a 500GB hard drive. It had two 250GB partitions:

• one partition running Windows 7
• the other 250GB partition only to store data (NTFS)

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 on the Data partition (150GB for data + 100GB for Ubuntu). All worked fine but when I boot the computer using Windows 7, I cannot access the resized partition (the original Data drive D:). I can see the unit in 'My Computer' but I can't access it.

I haven't lost the data as the partition is accessible from Ubuntu, so I've copied the data into the new Linux partition as a backup. However I would like fix this so that I can access the same files from Windows as I did before installing Ubuntu.

It's also rare that when I go to 'Computer' in Ubuntu, I see two 500GB hard disks!

I'm not sure what to do; I'd prefer not to have to format the drive, and of course I'd also like to avoid doing anything that might affect Windows' system partition.

It seems like the hard drive partitions are not well formed. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I remember having a similar issue because I accidentally enabled "whole-drive encryption" when installing Ubuntu.

There is an option during the setup process that allows you to encrypt the whole installation partition/drive.

Check to make sure that this is disabled in Ubuntu's system properties. Once you've disabled it, I figure you should be able to access the partitions without a problem from Windows.

Just remember that proprietary linux partition types are most likely not going to work in Windows... so if you have an ext-3 journaled file system, Windows will just act like it's not there/empty/corrupt.