Switching Partition Type From NTFS to Basic Data

Pedro

1/4/24, 3:04 AM

I have an external HDD that I can't access on windows, only on Ubuntu. I had a similar problem with a USB Drive but unlike my HDD, windows did recognize my USB Drive on Disk Manager and it turns out all I had to do was mount the partition that I was gonna use on the USB Drive and then on Windows I needed to attribute a letter to the Partition.

That being said the HDD is different because it doesn't show up on Disk Manager and I tried to see on Ubuntu the difference between the HDD and the USB Stick. I think that the problem is that the partition on the HDD is NTFS and on the USB Stick is Basic Data. That being said I wasn't able to switch the HDD to Basic Data too. I'll show some prints.

The first 3 screenshots are from the USB Stick (look at the bottom text of the first image, what relates to the type of partition):

enter image description here

The next two are related to the HDD:

enter image description here

This might not even be the issue but it was the only thing I was able to spot that was different. If this is the problem I'd love to know how to fix it and if this ain't the problem then I hope someone can help me out identifying the real issue

1 + 2

partitioning

usb

hard-drive

matigo

1/4/24, 3:19 AM

Considering how NTFS is a Microsoft-made file system, it's odd that Windows will not recognise it. This does sound more like a Windows problem than an Ubuntu one. That said, if you would like to change the partition from NTFS to FAT32 (Basic Data), then you will need to first copy off any data that you want to keep, delete the NTFS partition, then create a new FAT32 partition. There's no guarantee that Windows will be happy with this if it doesn't even register the external disk as being attached.

oldfred

1/4/24, 3:33 AM

NTFS is a format. But basic data or dynamic is a file structure. You are showing dynamic on gpt or LDM which is a proprietary Microsoft file structure. It was a work around for MBR(msdos) 4 primary partition limit. No reason to have LDM with gpt partitioning. Shown as SFS in fdisk, Dynamic also on gpt as LDM http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365449%28v=vs.85%29.aspx & http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/26829-convert-dynamic-disk-basic-disk.html You may be able to mount as read only. https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=ldmtool

Score:0

Ubuntu

Fixel

1/4/24, 3:23 AM

try formatting your hard drive to different file system, since it does not contain any data I assume it is fine for you to format the HDD. Here is a documentation on how to format the disk + difference between file systems.

If you want to share your files with the most devices and none of the files are larger than 4 GB, choose FAT32.

If you have files larger than 4 GB, but still want pretty good support across devices, choose exFAT.

If you have files larger than 4 GB and mostly share with Windows PCs, choose NTFS.

+ 0

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Switching Partition Type From NTFS to Basic Data

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