Windows partition marked as hidden after upgrade to Hardy

[Serge van Ginderachter]

One of the users I helped switching to Ubuntu, managed to upgrade to Hardy, and gave me some feedback on a problem he had to solve after that upgrade.
Right know, I don't have more info than this, and as the user does not speak English, I'm pulling this report here.

""
After upgrading to version 8.04, mijn Windows partition was not reacheable any more.
After some experimenting with amongst others Partition Magic, I noticed that this partition was marked "hidden".
Marking it unhidden solved the problem, and booting Windows was possible again.
""

Obviously, the upgrade proces should not interfere with the partition type of other partitions .
As this is an upgrade, I'm really not sure to which package this is a bug. Maybe Grub?

When you need more info, I will ask the user about it.

[arno_b (arno.b)]

Please give us your fstab:
/etc/fstab
I think, you Windows partition is no more mounted since the upgrade.

[Serge van Ginderachter (svg)]

Additional info

- /etc/fstab (after upgrade, don't know if it was changed):

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/hdb2
UUID=d40e069b-f692-41e8-a596-7ef571f8cc52 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/hdb6
UUID=6441b7a9-e8b7-44c0-a087-8e4b48a427b9 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec 0 0
/dev/hdd /media/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0

- system was upgraded from 7.10 to 8.04
- windowspartition was reacheable (mounted) before the upgrade
- after the upgrade is was hidden, and not mounted as to be seen in fstab here

So it seems somewhere in the upgrade process the partition was marked hidden, and therefore not mounted anymore.

[arno_b (arno.b)]

That's normal that your windows partition is not visible since it is not defined into the fstab.
Do you have upgrade using a CD or using update-manager?
The solution is to add the windows partition into the fstab; you can find some doc on how to to that on the web.

[Serge van Ginderachter (svg)]

I'm very well aware on what fstab does, but that's not the issue here.
It's not about the partition being not accessible from within Ubuntu, but about being able to boot that partition.

The Hardy upgrade managed for some reason to make the windows partition marked as "hidden" and as a result, Windows XP could not be booted any more.

The user had to run some utility (partition magic, although (g)parted would have been another option) to recover this, unhide the partition, and be able to boot again into Windows.

Hiding a partition is all about setting the "hidden flag", see parted(8) fo rmore info.

The upgrade was performed with update-manager.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Could you please add the log files from '/var/log/dist-upgrade/' (which capture what was done during the distribution upgrade) to this bug report as attachments? Thanks in advance.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.