When booting after selecting windows from the mandrake 9.1 bootloader a blue screen of death appears. This says there is an unbootable boot volume and to restart if it has never happened before. It then says to disable caching and shadowing. I am not really an expert on the BIOS which is a newish Asus one coming with the A7V333, but I found an option to disable L1 and L2 caching so I did this and windows Xp gets a little bit further on in its booting but then fails.
Is there any way to boot windows, I need a slide show urgently (don't tell me about backing up), is there any way to get it off the NTFS partion under Mandrake 9.1 and view it, as I am a bit of a I do not know anything about this.

Thanks for any help

Mandrake 9.1 should have auto-dected your NTFS volume. Look under /mnt/windows. You will have read-only support.

Sound like from your post you may have overwritten part of your windows installation.

You can mount an NTFS partition and retrieve info from it, as long as NTFS support is compiled into your kernel. I don't know if Mandy 9.1 has this compiled by default, but I think some of the newer distro's have this compiled by default. You can always try it:

mount -t vfat /dev/[yourNTFSpartition] /something/somewhere

Worse comes to worse you will get an error saying that NTFS is not supported. If so, then I would google around for instructions on re-compiling the kernel with NTFS support.

I have not tried this in a while (my linux box is linux only, and I always samba to my windoze box) but I know in the past that NTFS support had some problems with write operations, and that it was best to treat it as read-only.

slight

I think Moosedaddy and I posted at the same time...

slight

please do not mark anything as "urgent" especially when it's a windows question on a linux site...

Actually his was posted like 6 minutes prior to your first reply. Might have clicked the reply at same time but yours is much longer reply....

Sorry for putting Urgent but I need to use the data soon, thanks for the help.

With utmost respect to your status acid_kewpie, I think his subject line was misleading (which is why I looked at the post), but his question was Linux related. He wants to know if he can retrieve his lost Windows files (therefore URGENT) using Linux loaded on the same box.

How would that not be a Linux question?

He wants Linux to save his @ss.

What can I say... Linuxquestions is the only thing that keeps me sane while I'm at work.... but every now and then work gets in the way of my posts. It won't happen again.



slight

Does mandrake boot up? Try this website http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm - you'll have to recover windows xp with the install disk. and more than likely reinstall mandrake.