Ubuntu general mayhem

Well this is my first venture into Ubuntu and I have to say its not going very well. I always figured the best way to learn about something was to jump right in. Oh how wrong I was.

I have the 6.10 Live cd and Im trying to install it onto an external hard drive, which I did. I since screwed things up trying to make the NTFS partition readable and writable and as a result Ubuntu refused to boot. So im back to square one and trying to install it from the live CD again, only I keep getting this error:

"The ext3 file system creation in partition #1 of SCSI7 (0,0,0) (sdb) failed."

Now I cant for the life of me understand why this is happening as it installed fine 2 days ago with absolutely 0 hardware changes.

On another more important note I cant boot into Windows XP anymore. I keep getting a "Grub 17" error, or something to that effect, and I cant boot windows. Now obviously this is a problem as its a family computer, and the siblings cant get their evening fix of bebo, much to my delight.

I should have read some documentation to prepare for the install, but hindsight is 20/20 yadda yadda yadda.


If any Linux/Ubuntu guru could solve this catastrophe , I would be eternally grateful. If there is any information I need to provide, let me know.

oscarBravo

You've overwritten the Master Boot Record on your primary hard disk and you need to fix it.

Delira, thanks.

Any general advice on actually using the OS? For the short period I used it, it seemed decent.