Member Avatar for flynismo

Ok, this is a strange one...

Was running the Fedora 9 live cd, and deleted some stuff off my desktop in Vista. I also was getting ready to play a movie (all my movies are stored on my external drive) while the Fedora installer ran on the Live Cd. The installer crashed, and when I logged back into Vista, I cannot access my external drive. In fact when I go into control panel > computer, my external drive isn't even listed. I can only see it in Device Manager and Disk Manager. In those programs, Vista reports that everything is fine with the external drive and it is working properly.

To give more details, the external drive has three partitions on it. First one is an ext3 partiton I created to install Linux on. Second partition is the Linux swap file. The third partition is an NTFS that I have my movies, pictures, documents, etc on. I use this as a shared partition for Vista and Linux. Disk Manager shows that the first two partitions are active and healthy, but for the third partition (the one I need to access), it only lists the partition size, but no status or health reports.

To make things more confusing (or hopefully easier), in the Event Log, it says that some registry entries are being used by another program. What I think may have happened is this-

When the Linux Live CD crashed during install and I still had the external drive open, I had to hit the reset button on my computer, since the system froze. Perhaps because of that, Vista thinks that Linux is still using the partition?
So I tried booting up the Live Cd again, opened and closed the partition in the external drive, then rebooted into Vista, but that didn't solve the problem.

Not sure what to do now, the movies and stuff I can replace, but I have some very important files that I cannot afford to lose, and not to mention irreplaceable pictures of my family. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you..


*Edit- Forgot to mention that when I boot into the Linux Live CD, I can access the partition, it is only in Vista that I am having this problem.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by OlyComputers
Member Avatar for OlyComputers

I would go in through the Linux CD and check the partitions. There's a chance the install process converted the partition to ext3 to import it to linux.

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