Disk management should* see the partitions.

Start- control panel - admin tools - computer management

goto the disk admin management tool

on my dual boot win2k and linux... it sees all of the partitions. the win2k partition is ntfs, if that makes any difference and the linux partition is ext3

ext2 and ext3 are the linux filesystems. ext2 is a little older and ext3 is newer with journaling.

here is some documentation on the extended file system
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Filesystems-HOWTO-6.html

there are several other filesystems that linux can use though...
The Global File System (GFS)
SGI's XFS port to Linux
IBM's JFS port to Linux
Reiserfs (looks like someone needs to fix permissions for this one though)
CODA, a distributed filesystem like AFS
dtfs, a log-structed filesystem under development
Another LFS filesystem