I currently run mandrake 10.0 from hd5 on my HD but I also have a windows XP partion at hd1. When I am in mandrake I will run VMware and use it to boot the windows partion from the first section of my HD.

This all went smoothly untill I went to bed one night and left the VM machine running alas the machine had rebooted and booted up into the Linux distro instead of the windows one! of course this was worring as the host OS was also the client OS so I shut down the VM machine then rebooted to see the damage.

I am unable to mount any of my partaions. and when tying to mount it with mount -t ext3 /dev/hd5 /mnt/disk in the recovery program it just hangs (doesnt respond to keyboard but cursor still flashing.

any advice and does anyone know why fsck isnt part of the mandrake recovery program?

have you tried to reboot with:
shutdown -Fr now

to force a partition check?