I had a laptop with Windows XP and Red Hat 9.0 dual booting. I no longer have this as I tried to install Mandrake as an additional o/s but was unsuccessful. There is nothing of mega importance on the Red Hat install but I would like to save the data if possible from my home directory.
Firstly, a little background on how I managed to make a mess of this. As I say, XP and RH were installed and working fine. I created some spare space from the XP partition as I wanted to try out the Mandrake distro. I began to install Mandrake and on the partitioning front I used the free space available and did not use the option to use the existing linux partition. However, despite this, I can only boot into XP and Mandrake. Mandrake appears to have overwritten part of the Red Hat install as it won't boot. It is in the boot loader and successfully boots to 'Welcome to Red Hat Linux..' etc, but then there are errors and can't finds and failures everywhere. As far as I can see Mandrake is on Hda6, RH on Hda3 and XP on Hda1. Is there anything I can do to get this working? Any ideas on my best options? Thanks for your help in advance guys.

Assuming your primary goal right now is to preserve your /home data (from RH), then as long as you can see the partition from Mandrake, then you should be able to mount it. Once it's mounted, then (assuming you also have a CD-RW) you can just burn your /home data to a CD. In other words: Boot into Mandrake. Mount the hda3 partition (if necessary). Make an image of your /home directory. Burn it to CD.

For reference, here's how to make and burn from the command line.

1. Make your image file, which we'll call "my_image.img" by running this command:
mkisofs -r -o my_image.img /home/user/whatever

2. Burn it to CD by running this command:
cdrecord -v speed=8 dev=0,0,0 -data my_image.img

That's it - hopefully that would preserve your data, thus freeing you to redo your partitioning/booting scheme. -- J.W.

The only thing mountable in Mandrake is my cd rom drive and my XP partition, only as root at the mo until I sort the groups out. I can see hda3 (Red Hat partition) in /dev but obviously cannot access it from there. If I edit etc/fstab will this give me the option to mount or is there more to it than that? Thanks for your help.

atko - if the hda3 partition is not currently mounted, and is not listed within your /etc/fstab file, then Yes, you need to add it to fstab first in order for it to be recognized. (I would suggest that you designate hda3 as "noauto" because you don't want the system to try to automatically mount it.) Once it's added to fstab, just reboot and then you should be able to mount hda3. Additionally, I should also point out that once hda3 is mounted and accessible, then you could also simply copy whatever data you want to keep from the "RH /home directory" into a directory in Mandrake. It's not like you have to burn it to CD. -- J.W.