i'm a linux newbie and tried installing mandrake 9.2 a few days ago. when i got to the disk partitioning section of the installation, it said my drive was FAT16. Both Windows XP and partition magic report my drive as being NTFS, so i don't know what's wrong. any help will be appreciated. thanks in advance.

Are you trying to multi-boot?

yeah i'm trying to multiboot with XP

strange!my setup program has detected all the NTFS partitions and added
the item for booting from windows 2003 into lilo.conf automatically.

OK, first back up your data to some kind of removeable media. Then fdisk your hard drive with a 98 boot disk, delete all partitions, DOS & non-DOS (if you don't know how I can tell you). Then, using fdisk, make a NTFS partition for XP to live on. Don't use your whole hardrive, leave at least 5-6 gigs of unpartitioned, unallocated space. After you install XP, go through the Mandrake install process & use Disk Druid to partition the remaining space. Make /boot 50 megs, /root around 3 gigs, /swap twice the size of however much RAM you have, and use the rest for some other mount points like /home, /usr, or /var. Also be sure to use GRUB as your boot loader, I don't believe LILO recognizes NTFS partitions.