I have 2 partition on my hd, one Windows XP and one Linux. I can't boot in Linux due to an error in mounting the partition. When I check the Linux Partition with Partition Magic 8.0 I receive the following messages:

Warning 1232 Free blocks count wrong
Error 1201 Ext2 superblock contains illegal information

Windows CHKDSK also finds some errors on the NTFS partition.

What should I do??????????????????

Did this start after something special? Like did you only get the errors after resizing a partition or something? It could be a corrupted partition table or maybe the disk is getting ready to die. Instead of running chkdsk right-click the drive and schedule a scandisk on next boot and see if that fixes anything, I probably won't have any effect on the linux partition but I'm no expert in this area, someone will come along who knows better

The hard disk is new and I haven't resize any partition except before installing Mandrake Linux 10.
Since I am a new user of Linux I believe I did something wrong during learning Linux, but I can't remember doing something new when I used Linux for the last time.
The only problem I ever had before with Linux was the following message during installation
error installing libpiave0-0.2.3-4mdk.i586 and libncurses5-devel-5.3-1.20040125.4mdk.i58
I don't know if this has to do with my booting problem, but for a long time I was using Linux without any problem despite the error during installation.

How can I fix the partition table?

Not sure about Windows, but can you boot Linux to signle user mode (or off a boot disk) and run fsck on the Linux partition? That might help clear up some of the errors, or let you know if things are really bad.

I cant boot in Linux not even in failsafe mode. I only have the Mandrake instalaltion CD's, no Linux bootable diskettes.
Can I download and write to a disk any recovery programme or something like that?