Help me!!! Linux hid my partition!!!!!

[UcLaGeE]

Okay here's the scenario, I have two hard drives, a 60gb and a 45gb.... my 60gb is 15gb/45gb, both NTFS, the 15gb having my WINXP installation, the 45gb partition just data...... the 45gb drive was 15gb/30gb both were FAT32... and used for storage only.... here we go me trying to be cool and installing mandrake 8.1, so i deleted my 15gb partition on the fat32, allocated 4gb for linux, 500mb for the swap drive and installed it....

Now i got everything running, I go back to my WinXP and suddenly i can't access the 2nd partition (the 45GB one with lots of data) anymore...... under the disk manager, it lists it as Healthy (Unknown Partition) 43.66GB capacity, 1.28GB Free Space, 2% free, ... so it sees my hard drive, along with all the data on it, but why does it list as 'unknown partition'.................??? on the physical hard drive that i installed linux on, I still see my 30gb partition, so if anything i would of thought that partition would have gotten messed up... anyways, can you guys help me recover my data??? If i right click it, the only option is 'delete partition'... help me get my files back!!

 

[hoov]

What does linux list it as? Boot to into linux and open harddrake and see what it reads it as. Hopefully it reads it as fat 32! If not I think your data is toast. if it reads it as unformated if its a white, its unformated if its red,its probably lost if its a (Ext2) partition its a linux partition , If its white or red you might try to use the undo buttton but I think its to late. if its Blue its still windows( fat 32) and there is something else wrong. Im not a linux guru ive just installed mandrake 8.2 a couple days ago so im not for sure on this .

 

[thornc]

Well,
It seems that you have a problem with to many primary partitions!!

What type did you make those partitions on the secodary harddisk?
You can use linux's fdisk to check...
Linux can handle up to 4 primary partitions, but windows systems seem to be able to handle just 2 (could be wrong)!

So if you had that 45 gb disk with:
primary 15gb/primary extended 30gb(logical 30gb)
and now tyu perhaps have:
primary 4gb/primary 50mb/primary extended 30gb(logical 30gb)

Windows won't like this much...my first advice would be to delete those linux partitions and backup you data from the extended
partition, then create a partitions obey the primary/primary extended rule...you can create as many logical partitions as you want
in the extended partition so you could perhaps put your data into the first partition and use the logical partitions for linux?!??!


Good luck!

 

[Multi]

I think Partition Magic should be able to save your partition...try installing it in WinXP and see if you can change the partition.

 

[Nothinman]

Linux can handle up to 4 primary partitions, but windows systems seem to be able to handle just 2 (could be wrong)!

Win9X are known to have problems with more than 1 primary partitions, but NT has never had that problem.

In Linux type 'fdisk -l /dev/hdb' (or hdc if the second disk is the primary drive on the secondary chain) and paste that output back here.