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My SD card had a FAT32 partition and an EXT partition for Android. I don't need the EXT partition anymore, so I used GParted to delete it and increase the FAT32 to use the extra space, but Windows 7 doesn't see it anymore:

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Ubuntu still sees it fine, though, including all the files:

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Disks app "Repair filesystem" and GParted's "Check" did not fix it, either.

This is what parted shows:

(parted) print                                                            
Model: Generic- Multi-Card (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 31.4GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      4194kB  31.4GB  31.4GB  primary  fat32        lba

dosfsck says:

fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24)
Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem
Boot sector contents:
System ID "MSWIN4.1"
Media byte 0xf8 (hard disk)
       512 bytes per logical sector
     65536 bytes per cluster
       184 reserved sectors
First FAT starts at byte 94208 (sector 184)
         2 FATs, 32 bit entries
   1918976 bytes per FAT (= 3748 sectors)
Root directory start at cluster 6 (arbitrary size)
Data area starts at byte 3932160 (sector 7680)
    479620 data clusters (31432376320 bytes)
32 sectors/track, 64 heads
      8192 hidden sectors
  61399040 sectors total
Reclaiming unconnected clusters.
Checking free cluster summary.
/dev/sdb1: 92610 files, 408037/479620 clusters

Also tried TestDisk, it says:

TestDisk 7.1-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, April 2018
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
https://www.cgsecurity.org

Disk /dev/sde - 31 GB / 29 GiB - CHS 3822 255 63
Current partition structure:
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors

Invalid FAT boot sector
 1 P FAT32 LBA                0 130  3  3822 107 61   61399040
 1 P FAT32 LBA                0 130  3  3822 107 61   61399040
No partition is bootable

This drive doesn't need to be bootable. Quick Search finds the Linux partition I had deleted and resized over, but I guess that's not important:

TestDisk 7.1-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, April 2018
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
https://www.cgsecurity.org

Disk /dev/sde - 31 GB / 29 GiB - CHS 3822 255 63
     Partition               Start        End    Size in sectors
>* Linux                 3692  99 56  3822 107 61    2088960 [Link2SD]

This seems more important:

TestDisk 7.1-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, April 2018
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
https://www.cgsecurity.org

Disk /dev/sde - 31 GB / 29 GiB - CHS 3822 255 63
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors
 1 P FAT32 LBA                0 130  3  3822 107 61   61399040

Boot sector
Bad

Backup boot sector
Bad

Second sectors (cluster information) are not identical.
Third sectors (second part of boot code) are not identical.

A valid FAT Boot sector must be present in order to access
any data; even if the partition is not bootable.

I tried Rebuild Boot Sector in TestDisk but it didn't work:

TestDisk 7.1-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, April 2018
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
https://www.cgsecurity.org

Disk /dev/sde - 31 GB / 29 GiB - CHS 3822 255 63
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors
 1 P FAT32 LBA                0 130  3  3822 107 61   61399040

FAT : 32
cluster_size 128 128
reserved     184 184
total_sect   61399040 61399040
fat32_length 3748 3748
root_cluster 2 6
free_count   uninitialised 71583
next_free    uninitialised 2
Extrapolated boot sector and current boot sector are different.
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  • Do not know what Disks repair does. Have you tried dosfsck? Must be unmounted sudo dosfsck -t -a -w /dev/sdb1 The -a seems to help in clearing dirty bit – oldfred Jul 3 '18 at 14:41
  • @oldfred That didn't fix it. I pasted the result in the question. – endolith Jul 3 '18 at 15:18
  • Can you please show what Windows Disk Management sees? – AlexP Jul 3 '18 at 15:26
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    I have encountered the same problem. Windows can see and use a partition created by gparted (or parted), but not a partition that is modified by gparted. I am looking forward to your result. – sudodus Jul 3 '18 at 18:57
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    You can add that as your resolution to this and close this question. Too bad we can't get to the root cause of this. – Bernard Wei Jul 5 '18 at 19:46
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Check that your cluster size is the correct for FAT32. See Microsoft documentation for more details. 64k may be too big for FAT32 partition, try using 16k. Otherwise, you can try exFAT which allow larger cluster sizes.

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  • It was previously 64 and worked fine. – endolith Jul 4 '18 at 3:00
  • If you want to use 64k cluster, I'd suggest using exFAT. I don't think FAT32 support that cluster size. – Bernard Wei Jul 4 '18 at 18:11
  • Weird. Actually, I guess I don't know what the cluster size was before I resized it with GParted, but resizing in GParted wouldn't change the cluster size, would it? Whatever it was before the resize worked fine. – endolith Jul 5 '18 at 13:41
  • Are you using Windows 10? I vaguely rememeber some complains that microsoft has stricter checks for specs compliances in later version of Windows 10. Like some FAT32 drive aren't visible after certain Windows 10 update. So if you have an older machine with older Windows OS, you can try see if they can see the resized FAT32 partition. – Bernard Wei Jul 5 '18 at 17:54
  • No, Windows 7. But it worked fine in Windows 7 before I resized it, so I doubt it's due to anything like that, which wouldn't have changed since before the resize. – endolith Jul 5 '18 at 19:07
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I didn't find a solution. I ended up reformatting it and copying the files from the backup manually.

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