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I have got a usb flash drive with 3 partitions:
A Fat32 partition which is for transferring data between pcs,
another Fat32 partition on which I have installed Linux Mint (live usb)
and finally an ext4 partition which I use as persistent storage in Mint.

I am often switching between Windows and Linux and my problem now is that Windows always shows all three partitions and asks me to format the third partition. In order to protect the latter two partitions from me or somebody else accidentally formatting partition 3 or destroying data in partition 2, I would like them to be invisible (or at least write protected) in Windows systems but not in Linux systems (as I obviously need to write to them when booting into Mint).

Does anyone have an idea on how to accomplish this?

GreenSmurf
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    See [this answer](https://superuser.com/a/1219639/432690). I'm surprised your Windows doesn't leave the ext4 partition alone. What Windows is it? Is the partition type `0x83` as it should probably be? – Kamil Maciorowski Nov 15 '17 at 11:46
  • I am using Windows 10. It can't access my ext4 partition without formatting it but it is displayed nonetheless. How do I look the partition type up? – GreenSmurf Nov 15 '17 at 15:15
  • Fdisk says "Linux" – GreenSmurf Nov 15 '17 at 15:22
  • If Windows 10 tries to mangle with Linux partition then I have just another reason not to like it. This another question is about Windows 10, my answer was never tested with this OS though; and I never got feedback. Thank you for your feedback here. Maybe there is some other partition type which will make Windows stand down, I'm not able to test this now. Still I haven't heard Windows misbehaves when dual booting and there are Linux partitions on a fixed disk. I wonder if it treats removable devices differently. – Kamil Maciorowski Nov 15 '17 at 15:59
  • I just recalled Windows used to treat removable devices differently, e.g. it couldn't see more than one partition (compare [this answer](https://superuser.com/a/1145250/432690)). I believe this was fixed some time ago. Isn't this ironic? With this old crippled behavior you would be perfectly happy from the very beginning, I guess. – Kamil Maciorowski Nov 15 '17 at 16:10
  • It actually ignored the latter partitions until the last update (Fall Creators Update) on my PC. – GreenSmurf Nov 15 '17 at 16:20

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