My USB external hard drive with NTFS format works just fine on Ubuntu Linux, but when I boot the same machine as Windows Vista, it no longer recognizes the drive (it used to work fine on Windows). Another Windows machine also doesn't recognize it. It shows the drive letter in Explorer but can do nothing else. I can't see the drive through cygwin.
I've copied my data off the questionable drive, so the data is reasonably safe now, but is there any way to fix the drive without reformatting it? As I said, it's perfectly serviceable on Ubuntu, but I need the Windows access.
Best Answer
The times I have seen this it was a disk fault, not necessarily hardware. On the machine that assigns it a drive letter, one cheap and easy technique is to just run
chkdsk /fon it.