I installed a new motherboard and CPU now Mandrake 10 community seems to throw up when I boot to it. I wouldn't mind just formatting and reinstalling but I woul dlike to access the drive to back things up. I'm not sure how to access ext2 in windows but I'm gonna try that today I tried mandrakemove but I couldn't find any of my files that I wanted to back up. Any help on saving the instalation would be appreicated casue I'd rather do it that way

you can download some live-cd like Knoppix, boot your pc with it and then burn your data to backup dvds or cds...you'll need Knoppix for this (can be downloaded from web, burn on your friend's if you can) and a cd/dvd writeable drive...I guess this is one nice solution. another is, take your HD, move it to another PC with linux installed, mount it and copy/burn files to some backup location..

EDIT: or then just (re)compile a kernel that suits your new mobo and cpu...I guess you can do this with another machine or with a live-cd (like Knoppix), if you jus know what hardware you got grab the sources from kernel.org and if you have, copy the .config -file from your older sources dir, or if you don't have it, then just compile a new kernel. then, using Knoppix or some other live-cd, add it to your bootloader or replace the older kernel (I recommend not to overwrite) and boot.

yes mandrakemove is a live cd I booted with that. Interstingly enough I could not find any of my files. I know they shoudl be under /home/(username) but nothing was there. I also got windows to read the ext2 partition and when I looked at the drive that way my username wasn't even there it was jsut /home now I'm quite lost as to were my files are. I tihnk recompiling the kernel is to much for me as I don't know what that really means