this is quite an annoying situation i got myself into...

windows xp pro on my computer has finally crashed and burned, no way of recovering it with completely reformatting the system. however, i used knoppix to recover everything (had it on a seperate partition). i decided to reformat that partition windows was on so i could directly use one os - linux. however, a slight problem came up - it was an unknown format right now after i recovered my files. i have no idea how to recover from this slight problem, but itz important as i have several school projects due really soon, but i cant work on them till i move them to a partition that has enough hdd available (i need at least 500megs to work on any of them and linux only has 100megs left to work with due to the backup). can anyone help me?