Windows always makes hard drives unusable for other operating systems when it goes to sleep or shuts down using techniques called 'Windows Fast Boot or Power Saver'.
I don't know if this happens to you using samba access from Windows to your LibreELEC hard drive, if this is the case then unmount the drive when you're done.
Maybe give a bit more detail on your LE setup. What hardware is it running on would be a good starting point.
If you read this post it will give you a general sense of what is going on here. Generally when it comes to file systems and formatting, Windows and Linux they don’t play well. ext HDs not mounted after 11.01 update
No doubt you’ll read some have had no issues with mixing the two but personally I believe it’s best resolving Linux issues with Linux based solutions.
Firstly look at what partitioning you use on your hard drive and consider using ext4 if you have not already done so. I tend to find that is the most suitable partitioning system to use with LE when it comes to hard disks.
Search the forum for more references to this and be guided by this accordingly. Unplugging a disk to attach it to a Windows system to make it readable again is hardly ideal, is it.
the thread about HDs not mounting looks very similar; I've not had the issue before 11.0.0. Not sure that ext4 will allow my windows PC to update the files on the LE machine; that is a prime requisit. I need to did deeper though to get a reliable solution. For some reason my PC doesnt want to format other that NTFS so I may need to search around for other free formatting utilities.
If you wanna format a hard disk for use in Linux, use Linux. Use Linux Live USB. Here’s the details. Once created you can boot it from your Windows PC’s USB port. Even better create a dual boot Windows PC with Linux on its own partition https://www.linuxliveusb.com/
If your Kodi machine is on a LAN and you've enabled SAMBA you should be able to use samba from the Windows 7 pc to transfer files. I currently have 2 RPI3Bs (one for TVHeadend and the other for videos) running LE9.2.8 and I can access the 6TB NTFS HDD using samba and the portion of the microSD card that is EXT4 formatted (eg Recordings).
I'm in the process of moving to an RPi4 and did have a bit of trouble with samba on version 11 and had to use FileZilla which worked fine. My latest experiments with the v12 nightly also work fine with samba.
I dont think thats a way forward for me; I use windows on a PC to encode DVDs and then transfer them to a LE media player by the TV over a local network, hence the reason for windows to access LE.
Handbrake for Linux. Will encode anything you throw at it. There’s nothing in Windows that can’t be quickly and reliably replicated in Linux when it comes to an HTPC setup. Honestly you should try it. Start with the Live USB I outlined above and you’ll see. All you need is a USB stick and you’re good to go.
