Hiding Linux Partition From Windows

[Wickdgin]

I am dual booting between Windows ME and Red Hat 7.2 with Grub. For whatever reason my Linux partition is showing up under Win Me as drive 'D'.

I had this problem once when I used to boot with Lilo- but then by accident I erased my MBR and had to re-install lilo - which in effect fixed it.

If anyone had some thoughts on how I can hide my Linux Partition from windows it would be greatly appreciated.

[jcdux]

with win98 you can use TweakUI, I'm not sure if it workse with ME?

You could try a different filesystem for *nix as well.

[hogfly]

Just a thought. how did you format the linux partition ? if you did it as any sort of FAT partition it will be seen through windows. Try using ext3fs. That should take care of it.

[Wickdgin]

It has been formated as ext3- I didn't think linux would boot off a FAT partition. I'll give TweekUI a try, thanks.

[Wickdgin]

Ok, TweakUI doesn't work with Windows Me.

I just realized that I should have probably specified that it is not hiding the file system but hiding the partition from windows so that it does not show up as drive D: - b/c anytime a program goes to open drive D: it prompts the good old question "Do you want to format drive D:\?" And I can't have anyone else or even myself clicking format.

I do see with grub there is a hide command. I was wondering what this does, and if/how I can use it?

[rcgreen]

Run fdisk (from linux) and check the partition's
ID number. You may get a clue there.
Windows shouldn't see it if it is linux native, type 83
It's possible that linux could format and use the
partition succesfully, but it is flagged in the partition
table as a FAT partition (even though you actually
have an ext3 filesystem on it)
:cool:

[Wickdgin]

Ok here is my partitions/ ID

Devide ID
/dev/hda1 c
/dev/hda2 5
/dev/hda5 82
/dev/hda6 83
/dev/hda7 83

As you can see my / and /home partitions, hda6 & hda7, are type 83 (Linux etx3) - my swap is type 82 (linux swap) - and of course my windows partition is type c (FAT32 LBA) - and hda is my extended type 5.

I wonder if it because I have hda2 as an extended.

[souleman]

I believe 83 is actually ext2, not ext3, but that is beside the point. Although if you go to ext3, that may solve your problem. I also thought that extended was type 0F (hex) and fat 32 (your primary) is type 0B. Not sure what 0C and 05 are....

Anyway, I have never seen any linux partion show up in windows, unless it was on another computer and mapped with Samba. There almost has to be something wrong with your boot loader to do this. If you have a boot disk, I would be tempted to fdisk /mbr in dos, boot to linux with the disk, and reinstall grub or lilo or whatever you want to use...

[the_JinX]

83 = ext2

I don't know the code for ext3...

but howcome your ext2/3 is seen in win...
It doesn't show up on any of my dual boot machines... (98 nor XP)

[Wickdgin]

I wrote ext3 because thats what it is formated as. Fdisk lists 0C as "FAT32 LBA" and type 05 as extended, for type 83 it just says linux so I assume both ext2 and ext3 use type 83 (I know for sure b/c when I upgraded my kernel I forgot to add ext3 support and it wouldn't boot the new kernel).

I did once re-install lilo and that solved my problem , but then when I changed to grub it happened again. I am kinda tempted to fdisk mbr and re-install grub, but my last experiance with that I accedently installed it to hda1 (long story) and overwrote my Windows boot (by that I found out that sector 6 of my Win partition was a backup of sector 0 so I just copied sector 6 over sector 0 and booted up again). But if there are no other suggestions I might just do it- and I'll be careful not to do anything stupid this time. Thanks

[Wickdgin]

Ok, I fdisked /mbr through Windows, Booted Linux through a boot disk and re-installed grub - but no luck.

And by the way:
0F is Win95 Extended LBA

[SDK]

I have the same error on a dual 3 boot machine (98, 2000, Red Hat 7.0 in order). Since Windows 2000 Professional don't create me a D drive like Windows 98 and I'm almost sure it's a bug in Windows 9x. The Kernel of Windows is probably losing it somewhere. I almost sure that Windows is program do ask to do a format when he's don't know the file system he's reading. You'll have the same problem if you try to read a Linux Disk with Windows. But I'll try to check it out tomorow how to stop the problems.

-Simon "SDK"

[Rewandythal]

Right, Windows cannot, as far as I know, read an ext2/3 partition anyway (correct me if I'm wrong on this, but 98, 2000 and XP can't, so I don't know about ME, but I suspect it's the same)
So I don't know why its detecting it in the first place.

However, there is an equivalent of tweakUI called TweakME, which works on WinME, (as the name suggests), although since I've never touched Windows ME (I heard a lot of bad things about it. much like XP, but I did try XP for a while) I don't know if it hides drives, but i suspect it should do, if it's even remotely as good as TweakUI was in Windows 98!!

[rcgreen]

OK, I found that there is a LINUX EXTENDED type 85
so maybe you should use this number for your
extended partition, instead of 5, which is extended,
and resumably visible to windows, although windows
(rightly) doesn't see the logical partitions within it.
:cool:

[Rewandythal]

Indeed, that sounds a logical diagnosis!

[Wickdgin]

Sounded reasonable and indeed it worked. Thanks for everybodies help on this and especially rcgreen for finding the problem.

Haha, I was looking at the list of 'ID's/partition names' that fdisk prints out (l command), I don't know how I missed that one.Thanks again.