So I installed Mandrake 9.1 yesterday, no porblems once I downloaded all the right disks. SUre I was ahving a few problems with my printer, mp3 player, etc. but it was ok, I knew it was within my power to get those problems under my control. SO today my roommate asks me to logon to windows so I can print for him, and my second hard drive is not recognized by Windows XP. This is where I pointed Mandrake to install itself, and I figured it wouldn't install itself over anything important, but it would appear that it installed itself over the end of my second logical drive. Now because I'm using NTFS, Mandrake can access the files (mp3's episodes of South Park, PAPERS THAT ARE DUE SOON), but I still want to be able to access my second hard drive from XP, since I'm not totally abandoning it as of yet. If anyone out there has any ideas on what would be my best course of action towards making my hard drive recognizable to Windows once more, I'd hugely appreciate your suggestions. Thanks!

if your second drive is linux formated (linux native partition) there is no cheap way to get to it unless you setup sort of a heterogenioius networking environment (hint), and access your linux/windows shares with SAMBA.
P.S. There is actually a pretty cheap way to get around the problem with http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm, but it is limited to ext2 parttions I believe

The problem I've got is that my drive was NTFS, and it still is, the program that you linked me ot works for letting me see the linux partitions, but as far as the Windows stuff, no soup. Is it possible to move all of my windows files into the linux partition or something like that? I really have no idea what's goin' on.

So can you boot into XP still? but you just can't see your second drive?

What happens if you look at your drives either in FDISK from a Win98 Boot disk or cfdisk or fdisk in linux? Can you see anything?

Need more info

Running Partition Magic 8.0, it tells me that the hard drive is "BAD." Though when I look at the hard drive through Administrator Tools / Computer Management / Disk Management I see the hard drive as follows:
"(F: ) 88.37 GB Healthy" (but it won't let me do more than that)
"5.85 GB Free Space" (Duplicate of the next one)
"5.85 GB Healthy (Unknown Partition)" (Install Files for Linux)
"494 MB Healthy (Unknown Partition)" (Swap Drive)
"20.81 GB Unallocated"
"20.32 GB Healthy (Unknown Partition)"

Now the Disk is about 117, but for those of us that know math, which is clearly not this computer, it adds my hard drive up as being 141.96 GB. My thought is to delete the linux partitions, but I have a feeling that would be bad. I'm not really in a hurry her, but I don't like the concept of my computer being messed up for a long time. Once again, thanks for taking the time to read my woes.

First of all....Welcome to LQ

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I would boot into whatever OS can read the "bad" drive, and move data off of that drive onto another partition.

Next I would blow away the 88GIG partition....and move my stuff back.

Is that drive the one that Windows is loaded on?

Can you see the files you want to get in Linux or in Windows or anything?



Within Windows you'll see "unknown partition" because Windows is stupid. Partition magic will say the right thing.

If that's the only thing that's wrong, you're ok dude

Alright, so i used Partition Magic to convert the free 25 gig's on my C: drive into a new FAT32 partition, and then I restarted and booted into Mandrake read to transfer over the most necessary of my files, and burn the rest, but now that I'm in Mandrake, I can't find the new Partition, Drive H:. It's not listed in the mnt directory, and I tried copying into the win_c from win_c2 (the corrupted one). I feel like a real idiot here, and I truly appreciate you guys helping me out more than you can ever know.

The commands "fdisk -l" and "fdisk -l /dev/hdx" (replace x with the right letter of your 2nd harddisk, first command doesn't need a device because it does /dev/hda [your 1st harddisk] by default) will list all you partitions.
Make sure you have directories for each one in /mnt (Mandrake does that automatically), and create a directory for your new partition. Then use this command to mount the partition to the folder you made:

mount -t vfat /dev/hdxy /mnt/<the-new-dir-u-made>

X is hard disk letter (a,b,c,d), y is partition number (prob. greater then 5 because it's referred to as H: in Win)
Now /mnt/<the-new-dir-u-made> will have the partition in it.

In Windows, drive H can be one of the partitions from a physical hard drive. UNIX/LINUX assigns hda....z for each IDE hard drive. The number after hda for example hda1 is the partition where data is stored. If you specify /dev/hda to the mounting utility, it will complain. Though if you specify /dev/hda to a command like dd, it will not complain because it sees it as a block device.

If fdisk -l list partition table in an awkward way like
Instead of listing /dev/hda.../dev/hdz. You can use cfdisk but you need to specify the drive that you want. To find out all the drives in LINUX type dmesg. This will list everything that the LINUX kernel detects. You may have to type dmesg | more if your terminal can not display a lot of lines. Use shift+pgup or shift+pgdown to scroll the through the terminal. When using the more command hit either z or spacebar to get the next screenful of text.

You need to be as root or su to be able to use fdisk, cfdisk, and mount. Be careful!!!

Whiteha, Windows is not stupid. It doesn't have support to read or write UNIX/LINUX filesystems. Its like getting write support for NTFS in LINUX.

For the printer, try installing CUPS usually it has support for old or new printers. CUPS is like the features that Windows has so it should be easy to setup. Also you can setup LINUX to be used for a print server. Use Samba for this.

If your room mate is using Word or Wordperfect, you can have your room mate put it on a floppy disc and print it in LINUX. A program titled Open Office can read Windows formats.

BTW, you should make two seperate partitions for Windows and your files. Usually Windows will get corrupted and you have to re-install it.

Just Linux - http://www.justlinux.com
The Linux Document Project - http://www.tldp.org/