I own a HP pavillion computer. Instead of providing recovery disks, HP put the recovery information on a seperate, FAT32, bootable partition at the begining of the disk. I am having real problems booting to this partition to reinstall the xp part of my disk.

Basically, GRUB can boot to ubuntu linux fine
But the only windows OS it sees is the ntldr bootloader
so when i boot into windows (root (hd0,0) )i see the windows bootloader but am unable to boot anything from there

When i try to boot directly to my recovery partition through GRUB, i get
error 12: Invalid device

my config file looks like..

title Recovery Partition
root (hd0,1)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Please help me with this as I need windows to do things like play games and edit movies

How do you boot the recovery partition if Linux is not installed?

You might try the Ultimate Boot CD. http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Are you sure of the location for the recovery partition? If it is at the beginning of disk, then it would be (hd0,0) instead of (hd0,1) .
While booted into your Linux system, post the results of the command: fdisk -l ( that's a lower case L ).

If I was in that situation, I would make a grub boot floppy so I can get back into Linux later. Then, I would boot up with a Windows boot floppy and run the command: fdisk /mbr . That should allow you to access the recovery system.
When you are done with that, boot up with the grub floppy and restore the grub which will allow you to boot into Linux.

Thanks for your help guys, but I've already found a non-linux solution to this problem.
I made a BartPE boot disk (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder) and just ran "restore.exe" on my recovery partition from Bart's. No need to boot from it at all.
Thanks anyway.

I was going to say that the recovery partition is just a data-only partition. Without an operating system it is pointless to boot it.

Both Linux and XP can grab information from it. In Linux we may have to mount it first.