Re: Linux hides my Fat32 data partition

[Andrew Schulman <andrex@alumni.utexas.net>]

> Hi all,
> 
> being a relative newbie, and the fact that SWMBO uses my PC, I am still dual 
> booting Debian Sarge (2.6.8) with WinXP.  I have the following partitions on 
> a 160gb SATA drive
> 
> WindowsXP - sda1 (NTFS)
> Data - sda2 (Fat32)
> Linux root - sda3
> Linux Home - sda5
> Linux Swap - sda6
> 
> My problem is that my data partition keeps disappearing from the WindowsXP 
> environment and becomes hidden in Linux.  The purpose of this partition is 
> to store data that I want to access in both O/Ss and be able to modify it 
> from both O/Ss as well, which is a bit difficult if I cant see it :).

I wonder if your partition has been "maximized".  Consider this fragment 
from the cfdisk man page:

m      Maximize disk usage of the current partition.  This command will
       recover the the unused space between the partition table and the
       beginning of the partition, but at the cost of making the parti-
       tion incompatible with DOS, OS/2 and  possibly  other  operating
       systems.  This option will toggle between maximal disk usage and
       DOS, OS/2, etc. compatible disk usage.  The default when  creat-
       ing  a  partition is to create DOS, OS/2, etc. compatible parti-
       tions.

Run "man cfdisk" and search for "maximize" for more information.  In one 
place it says that fdisk and some other partitioning tools will maximize 
partitions by default.  I have run into this problem before-- I 
maximized a partition and Windows wouldn't see it, IIRC.

Try running cfdisk and see if you have maximization turned on for that 
partition, and can turn it off.  I dunno, but it's worth a shot.

Good luck,
Andrew.