OK heres the deal i think i kinda really screwed up my laptop. I had Suse Linux with grub loader on my laptop, dual booting with windows xp home edition. normally when i booted it gave me a list of like three Linux things and windows. I'm not really good at Linux and since i started doing alot of application work i had been using windows but i was running out of space and the 5+Gb that Linux was holding onto would have came in handy so i was reading some stuff about how to recover that, so I used partition magic to format the Linux partition into nts (might be missing a letter im not really deeply computer savvy) and merge it into the windows partition so i can have my whole hard drive back (its only 40Gb) well after it did its thing and rebooted I got a grub loading please wait, then error 17 and nothing else now i am stuck and upset and kinda frightened because i have things on that drive that are irreplaceable. I've tried using live Linux CD's, windows XP cd's it just seems to sit there for a moment on a blank screen with one _ on it then goes right back to that darn screen with the error message. Please can anyone help me i just want the data off the windows partition or drive, I don't care if I have to wipe the system to get it working after that I just really really need my docs pics music etc. Any help at all would be appreciated thanks so much in advance.

Can you get into your bios setup? If you can, check your boot order and make sure the cd drive is first in the boot order. Temporarily disable booting from the hard disk altogether if you can and try booting with the winxp installation cd.