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My PC was running Ubuntu 9.10 with two hard drives installed. I recently installed Windows 7 and I have trouble accessing the content on the secondary hard drive. The Win7 recognizes both hard drives, as I can see the second hard drive on the disk management screen, but the second hard drive doesn't show up under the "My Computer" screen.

Is there a way to access this hard drive without having to reformat?

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  • Might want to associate with your SO account. Or you could wait until you get 12 more points on SO, and then you'll get 100 bonus points on both sites.
    – mmyers
    Commented Jan 13, 2010 at 23:01
  • Also, if you'd waited just a minute or two longer before deleting your SO question, it would have been moved over here anyway without any effort on your part.
    – mmyers
    Commented Jan 13, 2010 at 23:02

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You mean Ubuntu 9.04, I presume.

Ubuntu probably formatted the other drive using the ext3 or ext4 file system. Windows can't read those filesystems, so it can't see any files stored on the second drive. If you need access to those files without booting into Ubuntu, you can do several things. The easiest might be to install the LTOOLS or an alternative, as described in this Linux Journal article.

If you never plan to use Linux again, you can copy all the data somewhere, then repartition and reformat the drive to NTFS.

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You need to reformat the drive as NTFS

Pop in the Windows 7 installation CD and boot into it and you can format the drive using that.

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