Too many partitions

OK,

it reads: The boot sector was successfully written.

then I typed in FiXMBR and got the same **CAUTION** message as in thread # 13

STOP!!! It really sounds like your XP and Ubuntu installations are totally FUBAR! From what I see, you have three choices:
1. Continue to try to recover the XP OS, and if successful, install Ubuntu. The upside of this is: You save your current OS installation, and everything is just swell. The downside is, you totally @&$% up the hard drive and lose EVERYTHING!
2. You don't actually have anything of super high importance on the drive, and what the hell, format everything and start over. Upside: Easier. Fresh Start. Less complicated.
3. This would be MY solution: Go out and buy another hard drive. A decent 320Gb Seagate SATA drive can be found for about 60 bucks. Open up your computer case, and remove the current drive, and install the new drive. Install your XP OS on however much of the drive you want, and then install Ubuntu on the rest. Research this online carefully, so you have fewer complications. Then, when both XP and Ubuntu are working properly, put the old drive back as a second drive, and recover the data you really want to keep from the old drive. Eg. You can find, and save all your browser bookmarks, and your emails, addresses, etc. Any Documents etc. should also be recoverable, unless you have accidentally erased them with the previous messing around. Upside: You have a fresh new install of both OS, you have recovered important data, and you now have a second hard drive, that can be formatted, and used to store data. Downside: you have to spend a bit of money, and time. A bit of research will make this whole process easier, and at the end, you will be the neighborhood GOTO guy for solving these sorts of problems. I did this with my computer, and when I had recovered all the data I needed, I partitioned the OLD hard drive, and formatted it in FAT32, so it could be read from both XP AND Ubuntu. That way, i can download video, music, etc. from BOTH OS's and access them from either.

D: This is what I found on removing GRUB. What is wrong with it?

I have a Maxtor back-up hard drive so most of my files are safe. I'd like to try and reformat but when I tried this last night it still had two partitions. one was about 171 GBs and the other around 73 GBs. I couldn't install into ether one so I reformated and that is when I got all the problems. This is a IDE 320 Western Digital HD that I just installed last summer. That's when I switched from Suse 10.2 to Ubuntu 8.4. The install went beautifully however the partitions didn't make any sence. Both operating systems said that they had the whole disk available except for about 60 Gigs. I just assumed that Ubuntu used NTFS filing as well as Windows. I could take any photo or music file and save it to my Maxtor Back-up (which is also NTFS) and then up-load it to My Documents in Ubuntu. That must be what happend to the 8.4 version of grub. It must have gotten courruped when I tried to install the newer version of Kubuntu 8.10 and when it looked like it was going to write over Windows, I pannicted and pulled the plug. (I didn't have the Maxtor then) It looked to me like the Kubuntu 8.10 Grub was in control and when I deleated sda 7&8 the working Grub went with it and that's when I should have come down to my friends computer to contact you. This is all my falt, so don't appologize to me. You've been a champ to have tried so hard to help me save my drive. A bunch of threds back there was talk of wiping the disk kleen...is that what FIXMBR does ?

No. FIXMBR FIXes the Master Boot Record by trying to repair it and if it can't, replacing it, I think. The MBR contains the bootstrapping code, which in this case contains the GRUB bootstrapper, and the partition table. It apparently pukes at the partition layout, and might destroy some partitions if it tries to fix/overwrite it. Does your computer reboot fine? Have you tried?

No it cycles through and flashes a message briefly that reads somethig like "Invalid Boot Sequence" and then starts over again so fast that it's hard to read. I can only boot with the Windows XP Re-install CD in it. I tried the Ubuntu CD but both of the OSs stop me at the partitioning saying that it's the wrong format even though I formated

In case you were wondering, This is all taking place about as far into the Sierra Nevada Mountains as you can get before you start coming back out again.

I'm guessing that I need a new hard drive. When I get it all set up, what would you recomend to use as an Ubuntu fire wall ? I have been using FireStarter.

You can just nuke the old hard drive if you can get all the data off. If it cannot boot, you still should be able to hook up and external drive and use the Ubuntu live cd to copy over what you need. After you are 100% SURE THAT YOU GOT EVERYTHING OFF THAT YOU NEED, you can go into GParted using the Live CD and delete all the partitions to get an empty hard drive. After that, your hard drive will be clean and you can reinstall XP and Ubuntu and remember not to pull the plug during partitioning BTW I do not have any Ubuntu firewall recommendations. I don't use 'em.

One last time

About that 'Live CD'...I tried that last night. I even took pictures of the screen to show you but that's moot ! I have to ask though: The sda 2 and all it's partitions had pad-locks on them and grayed-out the deleat comands, amoung others. 'know anything about this ?

You might have to unmount them first. Go to Apps -> Accessories -> Terminal and type "sudo umount /dev/sdaX" for all of your partitions where X is the partition number as in the 2 in /dev/sda2. After that, try again. You will have to do this again after every restart of the live cd as long as the partitions still exist. Are you sure you are ok nuking the XP install? If not, do not delete the NTFS partition.

I am ready to wipe out Xp and All the rest of the partitions. I have all of my data backed up. The problem is, that the last partitions are all locked up. They show padlocks in the Partition managersda 2 and all the rest of the partitions. That's why I've been trying to do this with the XP disk. BTW what's GParted ?

that the whole point of the title of this thread, How do I get ride of all the partitions so that I can start clean.

I'm real stupid when it comes to ' comand prompt'

GParted is the partition editor you were using. Right click on the partitions and there should be an 'Unmount' or 'Unlock' option. Select that and see what happens.

I booted up the Ubuntu live CD and there was only one ntfs partition left. It deleted without a hitch. I then restarted with the XP install and it wont let me agree with the eula. I think that I will try to install just Ubuntu later on tonight and save myself from all this guilt for taking up your super helpful time. I thought that you were locked in a dungeon full of Servers some where. When I read that you had to go to classes I realized that even though you might wind up in a dungeon full of Servers some day, you have things to do right now, so I'll get out of your hair and poke around with Ubuntu's install. I'll write you a thread in the morning letting you know how it went.

(also, my friend is throwing me out of his room)

Thank's again !

To tpwman,

This is a follow-up from hauns:

The full, clean, installation of Ubuntu 8.10 went perfectly !
I wasn't ready to give up Windows yet, but then again, I was heading that way anyway. Now I'm going to be forced to learn Gimp.

I can't thank you enough for sticking with me through this learning experence.