windows recognition problems

[squareyes]

Thanks Antonio,
I have a feeling that there may be something drastically wrong with this
install.
It seems strange that everything is in the same partition, I don't
remember during install being given the option of anything but /
Every other distro has a partition mounted as /,  a swap and /home.
This has resulted in being unable to access 26 gig of my drive.
The install was over an unsuccessful Deb install which showed
/hda1 (windows) /hda5 /, /hda6 swap, /hda7 home
Knoppix shows /hda7 still there, but Ubuntu does not.
Had major probs with Deb install, after logon, startx resulted in no
screen found,finally copied XF86Config-4 from Knoppix to Deb to get X
to work.

The behavior is strange too, after using the text tool in the Gimp,
on shutting down via Gnome, shutdown freezes , unable to shutdown
font...resulting in a hard shutdown
System has frozen during terminal sessions, and when totem media player
has been used. more hard shutdowns Ctrl Alt backspace , Ctrl Alt Del 
have no effect at all
I need access to windows, as I use it to print. Have been unable to get
any Linux distro to run my old Epson LQ500 dot matrix, several linux
guru's have tried. I wonder if my hardware is the problem, as the only
distro that has not presented problems has been Knoppix.Everything
works, only a bit slow, but will access,and  Read/Write to  Windows
partition.
 
Machine is
Athlon xp1700
256 meg ram
32 meg NVidia Geforce video
40 gig Maxtor 

squareyes at ubuntu:~ $ cd /
squareyes at ubuntu:/ $ ls
bin   cdrom  etc   initrd      lib         media  opt   root  srv  tmp
var
boot  dev    home  initrd.img  lost+found  mnt    proc  sbin  sys  usr
vmlinuz
squareyes at ubuntu:/ $   

Should "home" be in /   ?



 
   $ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows
results in windows partition being mounted, but cannot access any
further. Shows folders, but cannot proceed from there..
Have heard of apt-get from so many, sounds like a great system, but am
starting to wonder if it is worth it. 

Thanks again for all the assistance,
sorry to present too many problems at once, but suspect they could all
be related.
Take Care
Winton