Ok where do I start? I have a HP Pavilion with AMD64 at I want to say running at 2.4 gigs. 2 gigs of ram, and I am running a nVidia 6150le graphics chipset on motherboard. With a 300 gig HDD. I recently viewed Compiz Fusion on YouTube and figured I need to try this out now. It isn't like Vista wowed me that much. So I received a copy of Ubuntu 7.10 from ShipIt after failing horribly at burning my own liveCD of pclos. I played with it for a few days and decided to set up a dual boot so I could still use Vista for gaming. I partitioned 50 gigs off of my HDD for Ubuntu and installed it as I was instructed to do through about 100 walk throughs off of the web. I told Ubuntu to use the largest continuous space on the hard drive. Waited for it to do its magic and then rebooted so I could start to customize the distro to my liking. That is where the problem came up. During the restart I went to the bios screen and told it to load from the HDD instead of the liveCD and now it gives me ERR2ERR3 then nothing. I started over and went back to liveCD and searched to find what I did wrong. As far as I can tell my Windows partition is still there and so is my back up partition. But linux is no where to be found on my HDD. So my question is how do I get my Vista back and then get Ubuntu on my HDD correctly in a dual boot system,, if it helps I want the PC to ask me what to boot into everytime it starts. Like I said I am new to linux and all help I would really be grateful for.

Update here I guess, I have been digging deeper because I am really nervous about loosing data on my HDD. I looked around and started to learn about the console. This is the the info I found out from that.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x1549f232

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 31539 253330200 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 38097 38913 6562080 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3 * 31540 37618 48829567+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 37823 38096 2200905 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 37823 38096 2200873+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Any ideas if this even means anything, and how do I proceed from here, again thanks for all the help.

Your Linux partitions can be as small as about 10 GB, I use 15 GB for root, and then double your RAM for the swap file, so yours can be 4 GB swap. I suggest you try to re-install Ubuntu and choose manual partitioning, and be sure the GRUB boot loader option to install is checked. Your Windows Vista should be detected and added to the GRUB boot menu list. There are some other web sites which help for dual boots, just do a google search.

Welcome to LQ.

Did you solve the problem?
Do you need more info. -- especially clarification of any instructions you found?

the "booting" link below might help

It was late last night after I posted this. I am going to check out the links then try to figure out what to do. I enjoy Linux so far and I am not ready to give up. So wish me luck.

OK I formatted everything in my ubuntu partitions to unused space, then out of curiousity I rebooted. It went right into Vista without no problem so I assume that the dual boot loader never touched the master boot files or whatever you call them. I am going to retry tonight. I have made duplicate back up of my data so I feel much better about it this time. Thanks for the help I really am grateful.