fedora core and hard drives

[o-ren]

ok this is the situation, and i hope that someone here can enlighten me on what to do. i tried installing fedora last night with my 4 cdr's. turns out the second one was corrupt and ultimately i lost everything on my 2 hard drives. but this morning, i installed xp on my c drive, then decided to give fc2 a go from my dvd iso.

now my question is, everything works fine, i can dual boot. but when im in windows and try to access my d drive, it says it needs to be formatted. now, if i format this drive will it erase linux? or is linux on the same drive as winxp? if not is there a way i can access both OS's and still access my d drive from both? ok ive allready lost myself, any help would be greatly appreciated.

[imdeemvp]

as far as i know you can acess windoz partitions from linux.....and i read once that linux partitions can be access from windoz but you will risk losing it if you access it....BUT there is something i want to clarify your d drive is xp, right?

[o-ren]

no xp is on my c drive. from winxp right now it appears that my d drive is inaccessible because it needs to be formatted.

[crackers]

Windows doesn't "know" (or care, to be honest) about non-Windows drives/partitions, so they always appear to be empty. If you format D: in XP, you will completely erase anything on that drive. You can safely read the Win XP NTFS file system from Linux, but writing is ... fraught with danger. That particular module is still under developement.

The common method to get around this incompatibility is to have a separate partition formatted with FAT (16 or 32) that can be easily shared between XP and Linux.

[o-ren]

ok i knew i was a noob, but you may as well be speaking chinese.

you can safely read the Win XP NTFS file system from Linux,

does this mean that while on linux, their is nothing i can do to affect winxp on c drive? and i'm going to gather that thats not reversible. ie i can **** up winxp from linux by overwriting a c drive with something.

The common method to get around this incompatibility is to have a separate partition formatted with FAT (16 or 32) that can be easily shared between XP and Linux.

exactly how do i go about doing that?

[crackers]

No, this does not mean that. You could use Linux to completely wipe out XP, just as you can wipe Linux from XP. But there are Linux drivers that can read the XP filesystem (writing is a bigger problem that's not quite solved).

The solution I mentioned would require something like Partition Magic, but - I'm going to be very honest here, not being harsh - I think that this is a bit beyond your technological reach unless you're willing to take some chances of messing everything up. I'm not going to "walk you through" this, because that would take quite a bit of time. But you can do a bit of research on partitioning, the filesystem formats NTFS, FAT, and ext3, as well as looking into partitioning tools. This is a bit beyond point-and-click and what you learn will make you just that much better a computer user.

[o-ren]

thanks a lot. and your right, i'm nowhere near the level to perform that operation. however, ive wiped my pc about 5 times in the last month, not too worried about losing everything.