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janoliver

Member

Registered: 2011-06-01

Posts: 54

[solved] NTFS formatted external Hard Drive not recognized in Windows

Hi. I'm sorry to pose a question not directly related to Arch, but maybe you can help me anyway.

So I bought a new 4TB WD My passport external USB hard drive and, AFAIR, created a new partition table and a single NTFS partition first thing with fdisk and mkfs.ntfs.

Now, the drive is recognized and mounted fine on all my Linux machines, but doesn't show up in the Windows Explorer, with no signs of what could be wrong: The drivers are fine and installed, diskpart shows the disk and partition but doesn't create a volume.

So I fired up gdisk to get some information about the drive:

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.3

Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT. 

Command (? for help): p
Disk /dev/sdd: 7813969920 sectors, 3.6 TiB
Model: My Passport 25E2
Sector size (logical/physical): 512/4096 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 3829B71B-171B-40D4-BDA0-9B0A60774BAA
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
First usable sector is 2048, last usable sector is 7813969886
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 0 sectors (0 bytes)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048      7813969886   3.6 TiB     8300  
 

Command (? for help): i
Using 1
Partition GUID code: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4 (Linux filesystem)
Partition unique GUID: 1C78B251-F98C-4CB0-B39E-F5E14846E60A
First sector: 2048 (at 1024.0 KiB)
Last sector: 7813969886 (at 3.6 TiB)
Partition size: 7813967839 sectors (3.6 TiB)
Attribute flags: 0000000000000000
Partition name: '' 

Everything seems to be fine, except the "Linux filesystem"  after the Partition GUID code (or rather, the 8300 indicating Linux FS as partition code). What does it mean? "lsblk -f" clearly shows that the partition type is "NTFS".

Could that be the reason why Windows doesn't like the drive? Can I change that without having to move around TBs of data?

Thank you very much!

Last edited by janoliver (2017-12-18 12:44:08)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: [solved] NTFS formatted external Hard Drive not recognized in Windows

Partition type is not the same thing as filesystem type.  You should change the partition type label.

Doing so will only change a flag in the partition table, and should not have any effect on the filesystem or data in the partition.  That said, I'd never run partitioning tools on a disk with valuable data without a backup.  Actually, that's a bit redundant: I'd never have valuable data without a backup.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

janoliver

Member

Registered: 2011-06-01

Posts: 54

Re: [solved] NTFS formatted external Hard Drive not recognized in Windows

I do have the data stored elsewhere, so losing it would just require collecting it from different places.

I took the chances, modified the partition type to 0700 and - tadaa - it works now.

Thank you !