In my PC, WinXP has 6 drives & Linux Mandriva has 2. Can I import the Windows drives into Linux so that I can use the files residing in the Windows drives in Mandriva (though, I guess, most of the files in Windows won't work in Mandriva)? Also is the vice-versa possible i.e. using Linux drives in WinXP? Actually I intend to download some Linux apps from the Net when I am in WinXP & then use them in Linux to install those apps since currently I am having problems in configuring an Internet connection (LAN) in Linux (I can access the Net in WinXP).

Moreover how do I find out which kernel version Mandriva uses?

Thanks,

Ron

You can get the kernel version by typing at a command line:

uname -a

You can read the XP drives in linux simply by mounting them or adding the appropriate lines in the /etc/fstab file. If your XP drives are NTFS, writing to NTFS is still experimental I think. If they are fat32 you are set.

You cannot read linux file systems in windows without 3rd party software. There are drivers for doing that, www.fs-driver.org is one. Never used it so nuff said about that.

Hope this helps

Most modern Linuces will at least read NTFS with no problem.

I originally used FAT32 for shared data, but I now use EXT3. When in Windows (rarely) I use the EXT2fsd driver to access the Linux partitions. It works great.

If you are up for some semantical quibbling, what Windows calls "drives" are often just "partitions" in the Linux world.

You can see all your drives with this command:
fdisk -l
Then you just can see the partitions with this:
fdisk /dev/hdX -l