Hard Drive Help- Urgent

Need some urgent help here. I got a copy of Linux Mandrake 8.1 and went throught the installation process and followed all the steps. I got as far as the Partition section and seemingly set up a 10GB partition (i have a 60GB drive) for Linux to go into. Seemed to work fine and the bootup continued and the KDE desktop came up. However the option to allow windows xp to boot did not come up which worried me slightly thought nothing of it.

Rebooted expecting to see an option to allow Windows XP to boot but no sign. Now I was worried. So to sort out whether my files in the other partition had been lost I brought the hard drive to a friend's computer and plugged it in etc as the slave and booted up. XP recognised the hard drive but it did not show up in My Computer as a drive letter. Now I'm very worried.

Tried a lot more things than I've mentioned here but nothing has worked. All I really need is some way to read the data on the disk to see what's in the partition that is supposed to have windows. I should mention that Mandrake works perfectly but since I have no experience I can't even figure out how to browse the hard disk. It doesn't show up the drive with the separate partitions.

Have I lost all my data? Really need help on this. If anyone needs more info or screenshots I'll gladly provide them. Sorry if this is rambling a little but I've got so tired trying everything.
TIA

ive only used mandrake 7.2 and slackware8, after these i decided linux was not what i needed (win2k is a ig improvement over 98se and removes most of the resons that makes linux so popular, or not.. :)

mandrakes installer isnt nice! partitioning bit being the worst part, id recommend u get partition magic (i think there was a trial version?) which should be able to fix it.

it seems that mandrake set the linux partition as active instead of the winxp one (if u have the partition in FAT32 instead of NTFS u should be ale to fix with FDISK) which is why the option to boot winxp doesnt come up. if u set the winxp one active, u should be able to add the linux parition to the boot menu on it (not sure if winxp boot thingy supports this)

have u got a win98 install cd or boot disk or goto www.bootdisk.com and get it, boot with it, and type FDISK at the prompt, with this program DONT CHANGE ANYTHING exept if drives are active, this app will lose ur data if u change partition sizes etc...
i think its menu option 4 to view partitions.. go there, if ur winxp partition doesnt show, then its probly NTFS (though it may just say unknown type) - try setting this to active. if urs is fat32 it should be easy

also, why did u chose mandrake 8.1?

Thanks for the very prompt reply. I think you're right about Linux setting up its own partition as active and for some reason it won't let me change it back.

I tried the boot disk and went to fdisk. this is what is displayed:

# TYPE SIZE Usage
1 A NON-DOS 5044 9%
2 EXT-DOS 46869 82%


So the first partition is the Linux one. And the second is my original windows one. This seems encouraging as it shows a 82% usage which I'd expect based on how much I was using before i performed the partition with the linux installation.

I went into "Set active Partition" but it said the only startable one is the one that is currently active (ie Linux) and won't let me change it to #2.

So it seems XP has been affected somewhat. I really need to fix this. I don't care how screwed up windows is now. If I can retrieve the My Documents folder that's all that matters. I have never been big into backing-up but I can safely say I am now.......if I get this fixed.

Thanks for any further help you may have.