I have had a look through the different threads, but cannot find anything related to my specific problem.

As many others I also tried UBUNTU firstly from the DVD and then after a week or two installed it onto my HD. This I think was around Dec. last year. Everything was working fine and I was impressed with the speed of everything.

I had to regularly reboot to switch to WIndows as I have a few programs needing a Win. environment. I also installed VirtualBox to overcome booting up every time, but did not have the patience / time to get it to work properly.

A few weeks ago the PC did not want to shut down after the machine had been working for a few hours. On the UBUNTU forums I could not get an answer I could understand as the jargon the people use is not English, not even to mention Afrikaans. To try and solve the problem I regularly updated UBUNTU via the prescribed method until one evening when I did it again and this was the last time I could get the machine working properly. The PC would go through the normal start up process and then ended up in a blank screen. It did not get to the point of giving me a choice of going to Windows.

After battling for a couple of hours to get the thing going I decided to go the UBUNTU "try out" route.
I could work but could not find any old documents. I installed again.

Now I cannot access Windows and my impression is that I also cannot access the original UBUNTU installation. I have two 80 GB hard drives in the PC. Where the system is running from I do not know. Under "places" I would find "backups" being the one HD with practically nothing on it and then "9.2 GB Filesystem" from where I can access some documents, but the rest of the HD I do not have access to.

The whole thing is "deurmekaar" as I want to send a fax, download the appropriate fax program, but it does not install into Office under Applications. After downloading it says installed, but my impression is that it does not install where I want it to.

I would prefer not to clean up everything from the HD if I can prevent it.