Hard Drive Help - Urgent

quarryman

Need some urgent help here. I got a copy of Linux Mandrake 8.1 and went throught the installation process and followed all the steps. I got as far as the Partition section and seemingly set up a 10GB partition (i have a 60GB drive) for Linux to go into. Seemed to work fine and the bootup continued and the KDE desktop came up. However the option to allow windows xp to boot did not come up which worried me slightly thought nothing of it.

Rebooted expecting to see an option to allow Windows XP to boot but no sign. Now I was worried. So to sort out whether my files in the other partition had been lost I brought the hard drive to a friend's computer and plugged it in etc as the slave and booted up. XP recognised the hard drive but it did not show up in My Computer as a drive letter. Now I'm very worried.

Tried a lot more things than I've mentioned here but nothing has worked. All I really need is some way to read the data on the disk to see what's in the partition that is supposed to have windows. I should mention that Mandrake works perfectly but since I have no experience I can't even figure out how to browse the hard disk. It doesn't show up the drive with the separate partitions.

Have I lost all my data? Really need help on this. If anyone needs more info or screenshots I'll gladly provide them. Sorry if this is rambling a little but I've got so tired trying everything.
TIA

Fidelis

Can't offer any help myself, but you might have more luck on the Unix forum.

quarryman

thanks. I'm actually on linuxquestions.org getting a bit of help. might post the thread onto unix depending on how i get on......

j0e9o

me friend had the same problem and he had to format, he ahd 3 partions 98, xp and linux