Disaster with Ubuntu 5.10 Release

Following my experience with Preview release under QEMU I did not get enough time to play with it anymore. Later 5.10 was released. I downloaded LiveCD first, tried it at worked in native mode (not in QEMU) Everything seems to work, so I got bit more adventurous and burned the install CD.
Mind you my previous experience with Ubuntu was always limited to LiveCD version, so I didn't know what to expect, but with all the good publicity ubuntu was getting, I thought, what the heck. Well, thats where I was wrong I guess.

I'm not sure what went wrong, but for some reason when I asked the installer to format my existing ext3 partition, I started getting errors which indicated names of files on my windows partition. After selecting ignore, couple of times I got scared and cancelled the whole thing.

Result: My windows is rendered un-bootable (if there is such a word)

So what do you do ? Knoppix to the rescue. I burned knoppix 4.02 and booted my machine with it. To my relief, all (I guess I should say most ... more about is later) my data on windows partiotion was intact.

I tried fixboot and fixmbr from XP recovery console, but to my dismay, it did not help. After further investigation I realized that not all my data was intact. Ubuntu had done something to at least three files on system partition, so ended up with files like found.000, found.001 and found.002. Looks like these files (under their original name) are required for XP to boot.

So that is long and short of it.

Plan of Action : Backup important data to USB Stick, re-install XP