Installed SUSE 10.1 and allowed YaST to partition my drive instead of Partition Magic. When I had to choose the file system, the default was Reiser (what the heck is this) so I chose it. Partitioning & swapfile creation went well. Rebooted to Linux desktop - OK, then closed down; needed to work in XP. After booting up to XP, Partition Magic detects an error and asks to correct it. I did and found that my entire 200 gig 2nd hd is just unallocated space. All the partitions and data are still there now since XP is already loaded, but if I close-down and reboot, I'm sure the drive will be wiped out. I'll probably have to use my partition recovery program to get all partitions back. But what is this Reiser thing. If I would've partitioned the drive as EXT3 which I wanted, this might not of happened. Any comments?
BTW, don't laugh - I must of deleted at least 12partitions already because of screwy things happening and restored each one. And I have backups coming out of my rear!

I have no idea what you are talking about
ReiserFs is a journaling file system. The default in suse. It doesn't matter. If you have "unallocated space" it's not reiserfs's fault since it does nothing to the partition table. "unallocated space" means there are no partitions.

If you are able to access the partitions now, it means the partition table is still there. So what gives you the idea it is gone? anywho. rebooting can't do any more harm.
boot back to linux, and post the output of "sudo fdisk -l"