Hi there,
I'm a newbie who's just installed Mandrake 9.1 on my system.
I've also got WinXP installed, so I told mandrake to resize one of my windows partitions to find space for the Linux installation, but I forgot to defrag the drive first, and now I've got problems finding the windows files previously placed there.
Is there anything I can do to find these files?

The drive didn't have any system files and was formatted with NTFS.

I've just found out that I have no problem finding the files from Linux, but how can I find them from Windows? Windows explorer tells me that the drive is not formatted...

Windows, in all it's varied flavors, does not have native support to see and read linux partitions. I think there are some third party utilities you could try.

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

Good luck

I don't think that is what he means.

He wants to get XP operating as it was before.

In moving things around you've probably changed the partition table in a way which XP doesn't understand.

Don't bother with the above link, instead install this in Linux

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

This will permit Linux to READ and WRITE your NTFS partitions SAFELY.

Once you have it installed, backup your existing XP files, from Linux.

Then bring up XP and delete the errant partition.

Recreate it again as an NTFS partition and place everything back onto the NTFS partition using linux.

One quick way to do this is to first install the drivers and make sure you can read and write the affected partition.

then create a TAR file containing the contents of that entire partition (you better have enough space!)

e.g.


tar -czvf savedpartition.tar.gz /mnt/windowspartition/*

After you have recreated the partition, mount it again under Linux and do the opposite.

I'll try it out, but first it's probably a good idea that I get more familiar with the commands needed to unpack and install stuff