I have two hard drives, one that my Windows 7 install is on and another that I have my data is on. I had set aside 100 GB on the data drive to install Ubuntu, which has worked fine in the past when I used GRUB. I broke it by messing around, so I wiped it clean and decided to reinstall.
This time, though, I wanted to use Window's bootloader so if I break Ubuntu again I don't have to fix the MBR again. I was following this guide, which is admittedly for dual booting off the same hard drive but I figured I could get it to work.
I partitioned off 100 GB of my data drive and no problem, Windows still recognizes the drive just fine. Then I installed Ubuntu (manually creating the partitions) on my data drive. Seems to work fine, until reboot. For some reason, Windows can no longer see the data drive at all.
What's really weird is that when I was using GRUB as my bootloader it could see the drive just fine. Why can't Windows see the hard drive? Is there a way I can make this work? Or am I just going to have to use GRUB as my bootloader?
11 Answer
Look at the file system of your Ubuntu partition. Windows cannot hardly recognize other file systems than NTFS and FAT32. So if your Ubuntu partition is not NTFS nor FAT32 (the installer proposes ext4 by default I think), Windows will not likely recognize your partition since it does not know its file system. However, there are some softwares on Windows to see other file systems.
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