I've never used linux before but i decided to give it a go last night,
I had a working install of xp on a 130 gig partition of my 250 gig sata hd
I downloaded and burned the ubuntu 7.10 ISO and booted from this disk.
after verifying the cd which came up all clear i began the installation process. i selected the use continuous free space option when partitioning the drive, and it selected the 105 remaining gigs on my hd, fine!
the installation stopped at around 30% and informed me that there was an error due to a faulty CD or CD drive, it advised me to clean the CD which i was unable to do as i could not open the CD drive. i shut down Ubuntu properly and attempted to boot into windows without the Ubuntu CD.
I am now presented with a message during the boot informing me that an error has occurred with my OS.
I'm not sure but I think my XP install should be safe still but my computer is trying to launch Ubuntu so i try to reinstall Ubuntu in the hope of being able to fix my xp installation but when try to get as far as the "starting partitioner" window which hangs at 46%.
I do not want to loose my xp install
If anyone can help i will be forever in their debt.
thanks

If it IS your MBR that has been 'damaged', boot into the XP recovery console and chose the fix mbr option.

i tied it and it said it had been successfully rewritten but i still get the same error loading OS message.
gonna reinstall xp

What is the exact error message?

I'm just gonna stick with ubuntu. I got rid of windows all together,but what happened was the ubuntu cd had gotten a finger print on it because i had taken the disk out after i checked its integrity. THIS IS A BIG NO NO!!
grub never got a chance to install and the windows repair console was unable to repair the master boot record, anyway I'm gonna stick with ubuntu , I'm just glad i had nothing important on my drive, thanks for the interest though.