I am currently running Mandrake v10.0. I am planning on installing Windows XP later on. My hard drive is 160 gb. Using the Linux partition tool, I created three partitions. There are two 40GB partitions. One is currently running Linux and the other is reserved for Windows XP when I install it. The third partition is 80GB. For whatever reason I cannot mount/access this partition. Does anyone know how to go about mounting this and setting up permission so that I will be able to use that partition? Explicit instructions are neccesary as Linux is still a new environment to me.

mkdir /mnt/winshare
mount /dev/hd?? /mnt/winshare -t type -o umask=000

hd?? is the harddrive and partition you want to mount
most likely it will be hda3
-t type is supposed to be either ntfs or vfat (for fat16/32)

or you can just paste the output of
"fdisk /dev/hda -l" here

In addition was that partition ever formatted?

I think it was formatted. But I can always reformat it.

So what were the errors and how were you trying to mount the partition?

Is the partition VFAT? Because most kernel's I've used that came off a CD didn't support the NTFS file system.