[darsunt]

I have to replace a hard drive that was partitioned between windows and linux. There is a great deal of work on the linux partitions I would like to save. But I only have windows machines right now.

Right off I don't think I could save folders from mandrake linux to xp, because I believe they have different file systems. Is this true?

[simple]

Windows generally has FAT32 or NTFS file systems, and linux by default has ext3 file system. if you are booting from linux , then you can access your windows FAT32 partitions directly. Just use the mount command to mount your drives and you can copy whatever you want. Also if you boot through windows and want to copy data from linux into your FAT32 partition then check this out
Explore2fs

hope this helps, c ya!!!