Inexplicable
The tale I'm about to relate leaves me totally mystified. So I write this in the hope that someone a whole lot smarter than me will be able to explain what I find totally inexplicable.
I realise that the laws of genetics let you cross an Alsatian dog with a miniature poodle or a horse with a zebra - and interbreed a whole lot of other critters that are related to one another.
But what I didn't know - and simply cannot understand - is how it has been possible for me to have created, Frankenstein-like, a hard-disk partition that appears to be a cross between two unrelated and incompatible standards - Windows NTFS and Linux ext2!
On one XP PC, this partition - which is of the entire hard disk - is seen in Windows Explorer as containing 177GB of data to which I have full access.
Now you see it (click for larger
image)
Yet, on another XP PC, it is seen as empty, with around 189GB of available space.
Now you don't
[advert]For reasons I will shortly explain, the first machine differs from the second in one significant way - it is running drivers intended to give access under Windows to hard disk partitions formatted to the Linux ext2 standard.
Also highly relevant, until recently, the entire drive had been given over to an ext2-formatted partition.
However, the ext2 partition has since been deleted and a Windows NTFS partition put in its place.
Moreover, during the time when the partition had been formatted as ext2, I could only access it from Windows XP by using a special utility.
Windows' Disk Management could see it was there and healthy. But to enable the drive to be usable, I had to allocate it a drive letter with Matt Wu's Ext2 Volume Manager V1.0 app, which came bundled with the ext2 drivers.
Matt Wu's Ext2 Volume Manager
However, this utility does not auto start and has not been fired up since the PC last rebooted (and, yes, I have done several reboots to double-check).
So, somehow, on the first PC, the relationship between the ext2 drivers, the hard disk and Windows has changed.
But in what way and why?
Dive over to page two, to follow the story and maybe get clues that will let you come up with some answers that have eluded me...
