sorry everyone, mabyee im just paranoid.....(because i was told over and over again that installing linux was going to be drastic and stressfull) but...i did ok, but now im worried...mabyee i should have wrote the partition magic people, but i dont really care if xp never runs on my system again , not to mention partition magic so here goes.....

ok...i recently installed suse 9.1 personal. i used partition magic. now i am running xp and suse 9.1, all seems stable. while back in windows i tried to open partition magic, just to see how my partitions looked since the suse install.....and i started to get error boxes (i should have wrote it down, but it didn't seem like a big deal at the time) i was being prompted about some numbers(should have wrote it down) not matching up with some other numbers, im guessing after the fact that they were sectors not matching the table of concordence?.......anyways, i repaired a few of them and came to an error box
Init failed:error 117
partition drive letter can not be identified

partition magic closes its self, now when i try to open partition magic, i get the error 117 right away......

here is the question...
could i have done damage to either linux, xp, or my partition scheme when i corrected those errors in windows?
i can see why windows would not want to identify a linux partition... but if thats all it is the partition magic program shouldn't close its self....should it.........kinda courious about this

I'm not sure if this is the problem but,

Winblows can't see ext2, ext3, Rieser FS. (can't see linux)
Winblows also demands too see every drive or partition as a drive letter.
When you boot winblows up you will not be able to see or write to you Linux drives or partitions.

Linux can see FAT, FAT32, NTFS. You will be able to see your windows drives-partitions in Linux.
Linux does not assign drives or partitions letters. Everything is mounted as a directory.
/
/usr
/home
/mnt/cdrom
/media/cdrecorder
/winblows
ect.

You can even have the same directory spanning multiple drives. I would not try to use a windows app while booted into windows to try and fix a linux partition problem. Linux does not need windows at all to work correctly.

You also don't need 3rd party partitioning apps to make a Linux partition. Fdisk and Cfdisk work fine. Cfdisk gives you a nice understandable interface. You probably used Partition magic to resize a windows partition, and that's fine. I wanted to advise you that Linux can do all of that natively.

I have seen these self correcting errors in Partition Magic (PM) and it didn't hurt anything on my system. I did however run PM by booting up directly from the PM disk. Since running the corrections have you rebooted your system? Normally when you do any maintenance to partitions it is a good idea to reboot afterwards so the OS can see the latest partition information. As teckk mentioned you'll be able to see all your partitions and their ids using fdisk in linux. WinXP shows them, but has problems identifying all partition types.

Bill