A few days ago, I started using a pen drive based Kubuntu 8.1 distro.

I manually mounted /dev/sda1 from the shell using the normal ntfs filesystem. I then wrote some files to the disk. Windows XP stopped booting.

After reading up on the NTFS and Linux situation, I am guessing that writing to sda1 in normal ntfs (not ntfs-3g) mode destroyed my NTFS partition. Does this sound like the culprit?

I learned that in order to write to a NTFS partition, you need to use some other mode called NTFS-3G. Whoops.

I had to re-image the partition (actually, the tech guy at work did)...

Anyway, can anyone please confirm that this is what messed up my partition?

Also, how can I make sure that my pen drive linux never (in plug and play style) mounts sda1 and start writing to it in ntfs mode? Is there some way to totally remove that capability or explicitly forbid it?

After more research, I learned that manually mounting NTFS when you do not know what you are doing can be dangerous. Thanks for the help... lol.