I'm a n00b so I hope I am in the right section...

My hubby did a silly thing and attempted to install win xp when he had four 200gb nix ext3 hdds attached. We haven't written anything to it and hope to recover it.

Was wondering if anyone has had experience and could suggest a way recover the data, fix the partition and fix the mbr.

I know its easier to install win first for dual boot dunno what hubby was thinking...

Any advice would be helpful, ty

I'm not 100% sure I understand what your explaining but here's my take. You have 4x200gb harddrives with an unknown partition scheme using ext3 file system. XP was installed and now you can't access the data on the ext3 partitions. Depending which drive XP was installed the remaining drives should be recoverable. The drive containing XP was more than likely formated to NTFS which pretty much hosed your data. While its technically possible to recover its probably not very likely to succeed.

In order to recover your data you could either boot from a Linux Live CD and mount the drives. Or you could just install Linux and then mount the drives. If you left the partition with linux installed then you could just modify the boot loader to boot linux again. BootMagic for windows would be sufficient or you could just reinstall LILO or GRUB to your MBR.

Your potential for data recovery is dependent on what was actually done during the install. There isn't enough information in your post to make an accurate prediction about data recovery.