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In Windows 7, I was installing Ubuntu using Wubi (Windows-based Ubuntu installer) to an external hard drive when suddenly it disconnected from the PC. After I connected it back to the PC, and double clicked the drive's icon, Windows didn't show the content of the disk but asked me whether I wanted to format it. The hard drive has only one partition. Its format is NTFS.

I also connected the disk to Windows XP. It makes the Windows Explorer super slow and I cannot open the disk either.

I can open the disk on Ubuntu and Mac.

Is it possible to restore the disk and make it run in Windows?

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2 Answers 2

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Are you sure that the drive has been formatted to NTFS? Without knowing exactly what happened in your installation utility (I've not used it in a while, but I don't think Wubi should format to a non-Microsoft format, but I can't assume that either), it may have formatted as something else. I would try booting into a Linux LiveCD to check. Otherwise, it may have been corrupted. Perhaps your USB connections were not stable and data was half-written to the drive.

If you're worried about getting data off of it, there are utilities you can find online for recovering files off of a formatted hard drive. I've had success with some. However, it has been a year since I've had to do this so I cannot find the name of the software I used off-hand. But a Google search will probably turn up a lot of useful solutions.

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Try booting into a Live CD (Linux or UBCD4Win) and formating it from there.

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