Unable to assign a drive letter to my Ubuntu partition from Windows

Question

I recently reinstalled Windows 7 and backed up my files on my Ubuntu partition. Now I would like to retrieve them, but the Ubuntu partition isn't visible from my file browser. My research revealed that I needed to assign a drive letter in Disk Management. Unfortunately that option is grayed out (so everything else except for "Delete Volume"). Does anyone know why it would be grayed out or a solution besides the one I found? Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

It's grayed out because Windows does not support any of the filesystems that Linux uses, therefore the only thing it can do to that partition is to delete it.

If your Ubuntu partition uses the ext4 filesystem (the most popular one), you may try Ext2fsd, although personally I only trust it for read-only access.

Ubuntu, however, can access Windows partitions (the ntfs-3g driver provides support for the NTFS filesystem), so you could reboot into Ubuntu and copy files from it.