Need a free option of partiion magic so I can recover the 160Gb hard drive I have thats now in a linux file format…
I really need it in NTFS but cant do it 
Go to the manufactureres website, most of them have a free diagnostic exe that will format / recover mbr etc. for instance here you would use maxblast
There is a free copy of Paragon Hard Disk Manager 6,0 in PC Welt (in German) for November 2005. I’ve installed it and started using it. Very good.
Both Seagate drives so browsing there site now
EDIT: Doesn’t looki like they have one
Try ltools, download from here (gnu public licence.) I’ve not used it yet, but it should allow you to read the linux disk from Windows. (Google:read linux disk from windows)
Cheers. I’m really trying to reformat it so I can use it as NTFS or even Fat32…
just get a CD bootable linux and delete the partition. Or even a floppy bootable one like the rescue CD.
or just a windows 98 boot floppy and use fdisk to delete the partition.
Did it the long way…installed Win 2k to the partition then deleted it through XP.
And a complete reformat later…
On a kind of side note… these bootable cd versions of Linux that don’t touch the hard drive. When you are up and running do they enable you to read the windows partion and perhaps move stuff from disk to disk etc ?
I believe Knoppix does and possibly the Ubuntu live CD does as well.
yes and yes to those two Major 
DT.
The quickest way would have been to boot a live linux cd then wipe the disk partition table and mbr with this simple command: dd if=zero of=/dev/hdb size=512 (that is if the disk is the primary slave, /dev/hda is primary master ide, /dev/hdc secondary ide master, and /dev/hdd is secondary ide slave). After, boot into winXP, bring up the disk manager and created the new partition in NTFS.
Dos/Win9x fdsik is unable to remove non-fat or non-fat32 partitions (Linux and NTFS etc)
Peige- Knoppix and Unbutu both allow read only access to NTFS windows partitions, to copy you would need a writable linux partition or an fat/fat32 partition. For recovery, if you have 2 cdroms (at least one a cd-writer/dvd-writer) it is capable of burning backups. There is one live cd that uses captive that allows write access to an NTFS using a copy of ntfs.sys and another windows nt based kernel core file yet it isn’t being maintained anymore (captive that is), but under linux I don’t trust NTFS writes just like I don’t trust linux partiton writes under windows the two don’t play well together.