to fix your booting problems, start your PC with the win XP cd, and select the recovery console selection when you finally get that far. this will give you the good old DOS prompt. at the prompt type FIXMBR and press enter. this will reinstall your win XP boot manager and remove the linux bootloader. to sort out your hard drive and get you drive back to normal use a third party tool as suggested above (preferably partition magic, check your PM's......) and you will have a full windoze happy hard drive.