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I have a dual boot across two drives. I'm sorry if this is an obvious problem to some of you, but most of the results on google are definitely about a single-drive setup which seems to work differently in this case.
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T430 with a second hard disk caddy in the ultrabay. I have an SSD in each of the two hard disk slots, which show up for me as /dev/sda and sdb (the internal drive slot and the ultrabay drive slot, respectively.)
My Arch Linux system is on sda, and I've been using it for about two years. It's 1TB and I was smart enough to make several partitions when I first set up the disk -- it boots legacy from MBR with GRUB, so there's no boot partition but there is a root partition, a home partition, a swap and a spare partition of about a hundred gigs in case I ever wanted to install a second Linux system. For brevity I'll refer to this spare partition by its device name, sda4.
Sdb has the Windows 10 install that came with the computer. It's a 125GB SSD (yeah, nice touch by the refurbisher, an SSD, even a small one!) I only really began to configure this recently, in order to play some games that don't run on Steam for Linux, and to use a couple other Windows programs that I occasionally need or at least want. I now have GRUB set up to dual boot Windows and Linux, despite them being on separate drives (why would GRUB care?) though I could have just used the BIOS to select the secondary drive when needed, honestly.
Now, Windows does not mount Linux file systems by default, so when you open explorer to "This Computer", it shows just the second hard drive and no other storage devices (remember that it takes the place of the optical drive).
Now, it was my opinion, and I consulted a friend with more experience and he agreed, that formatting sda4 to FAT32 would cause Windows to mount and display it automatically (I don't know why we didn't go with NTFS, just perceived it as more of a hassle I guess). However, after running mkfs.fat -F 32 and regenerating my fstab to reflect that, so that Linux doesn't panic on boot, and after booting Windows twice, it still doesn't "see" the fat32 partition. Is there anything I need to do on the Linux end that can make Windows see that partition? Should I take this question to a (shudder) Windows forum?
EDIT: You have to set the partition type. I used cfdisk and it works perfectly now. My bad, guys.
Last edited by RMLangham (2023-02-23 07:10:32)
Unix? You can't say that on a kids' show!
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What does "see" mean here? Is the partition just missing in Windows Explorer, or is the entire volume absent? Check with Win+R diskmgmt.msc
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What does "see" mean here? Is the partition just missing in Windows Explorer, or is the entire volume absent? Check with Win+R diskmgmt.msc
In this context, "see" would be recognize the partition as readable and writeable and display it in Explorer. I fixed the problem eventually on my own, but at first the entire volume was absent, and diskmgmt.msc was only showing the disk and no partitions. Then when it decided to populate the partition list for some reason, it still would not recognize the partition as a Windows partition. I went back to Linux and reformatted it to NTFS thinking that would work but in the end I had to manually change the partition type ID in cfdisk to 7 (HPFS/NTFS/exFAT).
Unix? You can't say that on a kids' show!
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