I recently installed SUSE Linux on a Dell Inspiron 8500 to dual boot with WindowsXP Home Edition. It uses BootMagic as boot manager and it seems to work satisfactorily.

The system wouldn't let me create an additiona logical partition in the extended Linux partition using PartitionMagic, so I bought a 40 Gb Seagate USB hard disk formatted as one large primary FAT32 partition to use for data transfer between the two OS's. If I start in Windows and copy files to the external hard disk it works fine. I then boot into Linux the hard drive is there with all of the files intact (/media/sd1). Great! However, when I then go back to Windows, the hard disk has become hidden and unaccessible. PartitionMagic is not able to unhide it. I have reformatted the hard disk several times, creating fresh partitions and it does it every time.

1. Why does this happen?
2. Is there a soulution?

I am pretty inexperienced so use please small words.

htarko

USB devices are mainly used with "hotplugging" meaning that, they are mainly plugged to the USB port when the computer is running.

I have the same issue with my WD External HDD. If I boot from Lin to Win, then I can't see it in "My Computer". I unplug and replug it, and it works fine.

Thank you very much. The comment about USB got me on the right track. What had actually happened was that I had a single primary partition on the external HDD and when I booted into Linux the "Advanced Partition Hiding" feature of BootMagic hid the single primary partition on the External HDD. By creating a single logical partition within an extended partition on the HDD the partition survives the switching between operating systems. I was wondering why that was the way it came from the factory...

Thanks again.