Recovering a drive

My laptop dual boots between XP Media Centre and Ubuntu.
I normally only ever use Ubuntu, but recently have been using XP because the TDF on ITV4 needs silverlight.

All was fine until my instance of XP corrupted- I am now greeted with "Click yes to recover your installation, warning all data may be lost".

I thought that I would be able to mount the XP share of the hard drive through Ubuntu so as to grab music, photo's etc, but Ubuntu will not mount the XP partition anymore.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I'd rather not lose all my data...

I got all my stuff through firewire transfer to another computer when mine wouldn't even turn on.
That was on the mac thought, I'm sure you can do it with a PC in a similar way though.

unfortunately, Ubuntu has to many bugs to 100% safely dual boot from the same hard drive on different partitions.

maybe you should try Wubi, which is apparently safer than Ubuntu, but is more prone to corrupting, especially on hard restarts.

as for recovering your data, you can use a program which reads the shadow data on the hard drive and reverses any partitions that may have caused the problem.

possible candidate

and

another one

Managed to get the XP share to mount, backing up all my data now.

The intention is to expand the Ubuntu partition to fill the HDD, then use VirtualBox to load an Nlited version of XP in order to use iTunes etc.

So- how do I make sure that iTunes will reload into the new version of XP from the external HDD, and what else should I look out for?

havent used Virtual Box yet sry Dammit,
but for sure, loading Ubuntu on an external drive ensures no problems with the existing windows, as long as you install grub on the external hdd also.
if you install grub on the windows HDD your in a heap of trouble.