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However whenever I boot into a Linux Distro and when I connect my external Hard Drive and I am able to see both my external hard drives, what could be the reason for Windows not showing me my 2nd External 2 TB Hard Drive?

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Do you just not see an expected drive letter? Do both drives appear underneath "Disk Management" under "Computer Management"? – ziesemer Dec 26 '11 at 1:32
Both the drives appear beneath computer management, this issue is not restricted my PC its the same on my friends PC. – Pratik Dec 26 '11 at 1:51
I have both External's from WD, so when I connect there is this virtual disc drive that it mounts to install its software, I get both, one for each external, but not my HDD. – Pratik Dec 26 '11 at 1:53
If you connect only the 2nd drive, is it then visible to Windows? – Harry Johnston Dec 26 '11 at 3:37
No it's not if I connect both of them I can see one but not the other, but if I connect both of them individually by not connecting the other both of them are recognised by windows. – Pratik Dec 27 '11 at 4:22
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migrated from serverfault.com Dec 26 '11 at 3:33

2 Answers

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What filesystem and partitiontable is on the drive? if it does not show under windows, but does under linux this is a good sign for a non ntfs or fat drive, or even one with a special partition table not recognized by windows.

you can check the partition table type table with parted under linux

 parted /dev/sdx print

choose your drives id here (not partition id).

the filesystems are not 100% correct, but their type should also give you a clue.

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They both are on NTFS that's not a problem, because if I disconnect the hdd which windows recognises and reconnect the one which wasn't detected by windows I can see my HDD show up again. – Pratik Dec 27 '11 at 4:20
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As both drives appear under Computer Management, you should just need to right-click the one that isn't yet assigned a drive letter, then select "Change Drive Letter and Paths", then "Add..." - and assign it a drive letter.

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Thanks, I'll try that. – Pratik Dec 26 '11 at 2:04

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