How can I get Windows to detect an NTFS partition on a Linux boot device?

Question

I'm running Linux Mint 20.2 on a removable USB4 storage device alongside a Windows 10 NVMe drive, so not explicitly a 'dual boot' but close enough (and fast enough) for my use case. The storage device was 250GB, but I partitioned Mint so that its boot partition plus root filesystem only take up a little over 200GB with the intent of creating a shared NTFS partition on the device to easily transfer files between Windows and Linux (as my Windows install is encrypted with BitLocker).

However, after returning to Windows, I am unable to see my storage device through any means, before and after creating an ~25GB NTFS partition with GParted. diskpart, Disk Management, and a third party tool claiming to recognize ext4 cannot see the drive at all. Linux, my UEFI firmware, and live USBs all recognize the device (the last is very surprising since it's super new hardware) and all its partitions. I would assume this is because Windows is skipping over the boot partition and, upon seeing a file system it does not natively recognize in the ext4 system partition, discarding the device.

If this is the problem, I could mitigate it by shuffling partitions around on my storage device (I'm able to safely delete the shared partition and move the others before recreating), but I'm worried about that affecting my ability to boot from the drive as the boot partition is no longer the first partition (I cannot find any resources on whether that matters). Would the hardware still recognize it as a boot drive if the first partition is NTFS and the second partition is FAT EFI, and is this even the right approach to what I want to do?

If it helps, I have my bootloaders set up so that grub is currently only installed on the external storage device as the first partition, and its files created in my Windows drive's boot partition are removed (as they were created due to a bug in the LM installer and just caused problems overall).

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Edit: Output from diskpart before and after plugging in storage device:

list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online         1863 GB  1024 KB        *

DISKPART> list vol

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
  Volume 0     C                NTFS   Partition   1862 GB  Healthy    Boot
  Volume 1                      FAT32  Partition    100 MB  Healthy    System
  Volume 2                      NTFS   Partition    509 MB  Healthy    Hidden

After:

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online         1863 GB  1024 KB        *

DISKPART> list vol

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
  Volume 0     C                NTFS   Partition   1862 GB  Healthy    Boot
  Volume 1                      FAT32  Partition    100 MB  Healthy    System
  Volume 2                      NTFS   Partition    509 MB  Healthy    Hidden

So my bigger problem is Windows no longer recognizing the device at all.

Answer 1

The solution was found on Unix despite being referred to here. I just had to uninstall a USB controller and reinsert my Linux boot drive. Full answer is here.