Ok, so i have windows running on this laptop...and i crashed it...something about some .sys file when i boot it up...im not sure. So i want to use mandriva one cd/live to get the stuff off my laptop, and then just install mandriva on it after that....i remember back when i had mandrake on my other computer i could access the files that were in my windows section of my machine...so, if i booted up with mandriva live would i be able to access my windows files? and if so, how do i get the hard drive to show up? because right now all i have is my cd rom drive, floppy, and some network things...but no hard drive. I think i have to mount it or something...right? how would i do this?

thanks
-*Dan

Live distros do not mount the HDD automatically - this is to protect it.
From a terminal, examine your partitions by examining the output: fdisk -l

Laptops usually only have one HDD (hda) with two or three partitions. (A windows rescue partition, a manufacturer partition, and the main windows C: drive) The biggest one is the C: drive.

For the sake of this example, let the C: drive be hda1, and this is a win98 partition so it is fat32 ... open a root terminal in mandrake and issue the following command:

mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt

now the directory "/mnt" will become the windows "C:\" ... konqueror (or whatever you like) can browse to /mnt and you'll see all your windows files. Unless, of course, the drive has become corrupted.

If you get confused, post the output of the various things here - particularily the output of fdisk -l