shadow1515

Ok, story time. I was dual-booting Vista and Ubuntu. It worked fine, everything was great. Then I decided that I was sick of Sim City 4 crashing all the time. I remembered that it didn't ever do that in XP, so I popped in my XP disc, deleted my Linux partition and recreated it as NTFS and installed XP. Something obviously screwed up during installation, because it wouldn't boot afterwards. No big deal. I just booted from the Ubuntu disc and deleted and installed on my extra partition again. Through all of this, the Vista partition remained untouched and still appeared as normal in the partition editor. Only now, if I select Vista from the GRUB bootloader, it shows the "Starting up..." screen forever and never loads.

At this point, I don't even need to recover Vista, I just need to know if there's any way to get into that part of my hard drive from Linux (which still works just fine) to get out some important files that I really don't want to lose. Apparently something did screw up my Vista partition at some point, even though I never told anything to access it, because now if I look at my "Computer" menu in Ubuntu I only see the "Filesystem" partition which shows as 230 GB in size (the size that should be both of my partitions together).

Apparently the partitions got merged, so all I need to do now is figure out how get at the files from my other partition. It shows as mostly full, so they are there, but I can't easily find them by browsing. The windows folders don't seem to be visible. Any ideas on how I could get my stuff back?

EDIT: Ok, I found it. My entire Vista partition showed up in the Linux file browser as an "internal mountable partition." I can access all my stuff to back it up, so that's all good. I just have a question: how the eff did that happen? Is there any common thing that could go wrong in a normal Linux or Windows XP installation that would do something like that?