Black screen with blinking underscore after Ubuntu installation

[dnlhrdz]

burned the latest ubuntu on a cd and tried to install it on my
hp desktop which runs windows xp home 32bit
i believe i installed the ubuntu os but not sure
during the installation process it did notify me that it did not find any other
OS but i should have right? , my windows xp os right?
well it said if i wanted to continue to it would erase everything and install ubuntu but i said no and chose a different option
well the point is that after all that , it said it had installed , it ejected the cd and asked to reboot so i did
but once i did i got this black screen with a white blinking underscore on the top left
and it doesnt do anything, i have tried pressing F8 or F12 continuously but nothing happens, it get the same result: the black screen with the white blinking underscore
well if anyone knows how to fix this please let me know
oh and fyi im a total newbie

 

[Leeky]

It sounds like something has gone wrong somewhere.

Do you have the option to boot into Vista or linux at bootup? What model is your graphics card?

How to work the hard drives can be confusing the first few times you work with them. If your of windows mindframe the way in which they're refered to is confusing.

If you put the install disc in, and then start a new installation again, when you get to the disc utility, you should have 3 partitions. The first will be NTFS (Vista), the 2nd should be ext4 (this is the linux filesystem) and the 3rd should be SWAP (the swap partition for Linux).

Ubuntu will work with pretty much all graphics hardware, though some better than others. I take it the entire installation up until asking you to remove your installation CD went to plan?

Other than the blinking underscore, is any other information displayed? I'm wondering if its failing to boot the GUI (desktop) and is throw into the command line instead.

 

[dnlhrdz]

no i do not get the option for anything
the only thing i could do i guess is choose the booting options like hard drive or cd
but when i chose hard drive , the same things happens, i get the black screen with the blinking underscore
well i ran the ubuntu desktop live version whatever it is and i noticed that the previous ubuntu installation
took up all of my hard drive and now i think my windows xp is lost forever? ((((((
oh no , i hope i could get it back , i had all my files in there , is there any way i could recover it?