d drive
 

i just re-installed linux, i have two windows partitions but now windows claims that the d drive needs re-formatting, i seem to remember this happening before but my stuff was still on the d drive. i didn't reformat that partition during the re-install so everything SHOULD be there, what to do???

ok. so let's start off by calling the "d drive" hdb as that'd presuambly what it actually is. you have linux installed on the second drive, hdb, and windows on the first, hda? but windows still tries to read hdb. ok, that suggests that the fat entry for /dev/hdb1 is incorrect adn still says fat32 or ntfs despite it being formatted. check by running "fdisk -l /dev/hdb" to list what it thinks is on there. if it is indeed the wrong fs type listed, use fdisk or cfdisk to interactively change the file system entry in teh file allocation table. this will NOT affect the partition itself, so don't worry about that.

no - i have one hard disk with many linux partitions on it, i also have two windows partitions, in windows these are c and d. D was dos-formatted before i re-installed and had data on it. The re-install worked fine but now when i go back into windows and try yo select the d drive as before it gives "the disk is not formatted, format it now?" message

when i did the re-install i made sure not to format the two windows partitions.

the data should be there, is there something simple i can to to get the drive contents to be visible again?

As Acid_kewpie suggest run fdisk -l /dev/hda and post the results. That will tell us what happened and then we can further help you diagnose your problem.