psychodave

This could be a problem with windows, but I'm working from Ubuntu and it's very possible that it could be fixed/the cause of the problem - whatever.

Recently my Windows boot has gone a bit loco and i've been using Ubuntu instead. However, I tried to get back into windows about a week ago, and I got the message "filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7", as well as "NTLDR is compressed" and prompted to restart. This was after I had installed the latest kernal, and had edited GRUB so that my windows boot option was top again (as updating the kernal seems to delete the windows option). I can't mount my Windows partition in Ubuntu at all, then again I can't remember the auto mount ever working on this particular installation. Curiously, it lists it in disks as vfat even though as a windows xp partition it should be ntfs.

I've run the windows recovery CD and et cetera, and it seems to run fine and reinstall everything, but this problem still crops up. I suspect that either my hard drive is corrupted (**** knows how that happened, I know I had software problems but I didn't do anything to the drive), or GRUB has been misconfigured, or maybe it's something wrong with my bootloader or something.

Aware this isn't a Ubuntu/linux specific question, but I was hoping you guys could shed some light on it - Obviously there's formatting, but I have a LOT of stuff I want to recover on my windows partition, so it's an absolute last resort.