I'm using a USB drive of 128GB on which I installed Ubuntu 16, I'm using this drive to run Ubuntu alongside Windows. This works fine, except for one thing; I can't see the FAT32 partition in Windows which I created via Ubuntu. It is partition /dev/sdb3:
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 32 156250031 156250000 74.5G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 156250112 187500543 31250432 14.9G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
**/dev/sdb3 187500544 242614271 55113728 26.3G b W95 FAT32**
But what I would like to have is a partition on the USB drive that both Windows and Ubuntu can work with. For that goal I created the partition '/dev/sdb3' as you can see in the above output of 'fdisk -l'. Unfortunately, that partition cannot be seen in Windows. It sees the drive as a RAW partition, as you can see in this picture (see partition E:).
What I tried is formatting the drive in Windows, but that also formats the other partitions.
Does anybody know how this can happen? And what can I do to have a partition that can be seen in Windows and Ubuntu?
Best Answer
This is a Windows issue, not an Ubuntu one. Nevertheless the reason is simple: Windows cannot see past the first partition on USB drives.
Here's how to do it correctly:
In this way, you get an advantage: Windows won't see the Linux partitions at all. I did this on a live USB key that needed a Windows part and it worked perfectly.