Can't access windows partition

[gurrett86]

Anyone willing to take on this problem please go ahead. I have an external hard drive with a 220gb windows ntfs partition and the rest is 12gb for linux. When I am in windows xp it cannot read the larger partition and says it needs to be formatted. I have info on this partition and just wondered if there is a way to fix it without reformatting. This started after I installed grub to the hard drive, which obviously is on the windows partition. Linux reads this as boot when I run fdisk and I am assuming this has something to do with it. Thanks in advance.

[je_fro]

so,
let's call this drive /dev/hde
when you run fdisk /dev/hde you get

hde1 ntfs (fdisk sees this as boot?)
hde2 / (your root filesystem)

and that's it? I doubt grub wrote anything to an ntfs partition. Perhaps you can get at the data by mounting the ntfs partition and copying the data off it...

modprobe ntfs (to make sure you can read the filesystem)
mount -t ntfs /dev/hde1 /mnt/cdrom (mount the partition somewhere temporarily)

if those steps executed without errors then you can cp the files from /mnt/cdrom

[hard candy]

In WinXP, right click on My Computer. Click on "Mamage", then "Disk Management" A window will pop up, in the bottom pane on the right, scroll down and see if the disk is listed. If it is listed, right click on it and choose "Mark partition as active".

[EnigmaOne]

Click on "Mamage"...
I'm beyond afraid to ask...

[gurrett86]

so,
let's call this drive /dev/hde
when you run fdisk /dev/hde you get

hde1 ntfs (fdisk sees this as boot?)
hde2 / (your root filesystem)

and that's it? I doubt grub wrote anything to an ntfs partition. Perhaps you can get at the data by mounting the ntfs partition and copying the data off it...

modprobe ntfs (to make sure you can read the filesystem)
mount -t ntfs /dev/hde1 /mnt/cdrom (mount the partition somewhere temporarily)

if those steps executed without errors then you can cp the files from /mnt/cdrom

When I try to mount the partition I receive the following error.

Bad Superblock
Missing code page

When I run dmesg it reads:
NTFS warning invalid boot sector checksum
NTFS error primary boot sector is invalid
NTFS error mount option errors
NTFS error not an NTFS volume

[dkeav]

you need to recompile your kernel with the proper nls page support compiled in