hey guys i have a 250g hdd with W7 on it and a 70gb hardrive with Ubuntu on it dual boot when the pc boots it boots up as the ubuntu boot menu with the option to boot into w7 at the bottom. i use w7 more and need to format the ubuntu drive heres the problems though.

i cant see the 70gb drive in windows at all not even in the disk management area and if and when i do find the 70gb drive to format it im going have trouble with the grub boot loader right as the 7 one is not there... any help would be great

Do you have a windows 7 installation CD or Recovery CD with you? Check these links

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu...+question/1800
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=272313

Disclaimer: Messing up with your MBR may cause your system to not boot at all. No, I haven't tried these options myself.

My dualbooting requirements are similar to you Windows 7 (more), Ubuntu (less). So I installed Ubuntu using Wubi Installer. That way it didn't mess up my MBR.

Windows can't see any drives formatted with non NTFS or FAT filesystems which is why you can't see you're Ubuntu drive from Windows.

What you need to do is install the Windows boot loader over the top of GRUB and then load a linux live CD and format your Ubuntu drive to FAT or NTFS. Then boot Windows and re-format the now see-able drive.

You don't see the Windows 7 drive from Ubuntu? You should.

For Windows, I recommend you install something like Paragon Partition Manager Express (download.com is one source). It will help you see what you can see.

AFAIK, windows cant mount drives with ext3 and his friends, but you should be capable to see and manage the partitions, no matters what filesystems are on them

you shouldnt try to modify any boot section until you understands where your data are.

its very sad to lose data by lazyness