partition woes

[Robert Hall <rwhall@xxxxxxx>]

i made a bunch of partitions in mandrake. when i wanted to install debian 
on one of them it cannot see anything other than a 250GB drive. they go 
like this:
hdc1:10gig /
hdc5:1gig swap
hdc3:10gig /home
hdc6:10gig unused
hdc7:1gig swap
hdc8:10gig unused
hdc9:99gig /mnt/play
hdc10:90gig /mnt/work
all of them are Journalized FS ext3 other than swap
6 and 8 were supposto be for debain and ubuntu but neither can see the 
partitions.  dont want to blow them away because i have 30gig of unburned 
data on /mnt/work.
hdd is xp unfortunately. and no room there to put anything but 15gig maby.
any idea why they are unreadable with debain? is it because of ext3 - 
which i know very little about?

thanks -robert hall