I bought another hd I put windows 98se then partition magic. I then made a partition of 20 for Xandros 3.0. I installed xandros which seems to work fine. Now I can't access my windows partition.

When I go into my other hd under qtparted it says it is hidden. How do I unhide it?

I've read on here not to do a reinstall. I put the partition magic disk in to boot to that and it wants dos commands. I don't know how to do dos. When windows tries to load it goes to an A prompt wanting a \windows\command. I don't know what it wants.

Is there a way to fix this through xandros? Did xandros loading Lilo do something? I've seen that on here too.

I am not very computer literate so I do need simplified directions, I apologize in advance.

Welcome to the PartitionMagic Victims Club.

You can use the grub shell to unhide a partition. If grub is not available in your distribution, then you can run it from Knoppix.

For example, assume that you want to unhide hda3, where hda will be assumed to be the first drive in your system. In grub-speak, that partition is (hd0,2), since grub numbering starts at zero. You would start the grub shell and then invoke the unhide command like this:

#grub
grub> unhide (hd0,2)
grub> quit
#

For more details, read section 4.2.6 “DOS/Windows” in the Grub Manual for an example of using unhide: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...OS_002fWindows

This is what comes up on fdisk. Xandros I believe uses Lilo. Will the grub commands still work?

Yeah, I read use partition magic it's great, Now this and I'm seeing all the horror stories when I actually googled the outcome on how to fix this.

Disk /dev/hdb: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 7179 57665286 1c Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hdb2 7244 9729 19968795 83 Linux
/dev/hdb3 7180 7243 514080 82 Linux swap
/dev/hdb4 * 9730 9730 0 e W95 FAT16 (LBA)

Partition table entries are not in disk order
/home/dean#

Easily fixed from fdisk.
Once in ("fdisk /dev/hdb"), "m" lists all the commands.
"p" is a good place to start, then maybe "l".
Use "t" to change the id - you'll notice the (M$oft) hidden types are all just x'10' more than the normal types.
In your case change partition 4 to "6", and partition 1 to "c".

"w" writes the changes out, and then "q" quits.

Easy - er, note no quotes when you are entering data.

Ok, there is my first problem. I really don't understand what you're saying to do. I know how to get into fdisk. It's when the commands come into play I mess everything up. I'm not really computer literate (self taught) so the directions are kinda greek to me. I'm really not sure it what order everything needs to be.
Here are the usage directions (commands below)

Usage: fdisk [-b SSZ] [-u] DISK Change partition table
fdisk -l [-b SSZ] [-u] DISK List partition table(s)
fdisk -s PARTITION Give partition size(s) in blocks
fdisk -v Give fdisk version
Here DISK is something like /dev/hdb or /dev/sda
and PARTITION is something like /dev/hda7
-u: give Start and End in sector (instead of cylinder) units
-b 2048: (for certain MO disks) use 2048-byte sectors

Here are my list of commands

Command action
a toggle a bootable flag
b edit bsd disklabel
c toggle the dos compatibility flag
d delete a partition
l list known partition types
m print this menu
n add a new partition
o create a new empty DOS partition table
p print the partition table
q quit without saving changes
s create a new empty Sun disklabel
t change a partition's system id
u change display/entry units
v verify the partition table
w write table to disk and exit
x extra functionality (experts only)

Self taught is good.
Reread what I said - you should be able to follow.

Do as you wish - if you screw up, use the "q" command. You can do no damage.
When you are confident you understand what you have done, commit the changes with the "w".

Play and learn ...

Are you kidding me? I already said I don't know how to put the commands in and this is the response you give. Play and learn.

Whatever, if you had no intention of ACTUALLY helping you should not be responding to people. What a jerk!