ok, so its taking me a while to get this dual boot going and now that I have no OS on my com....it still won't work. I have set 2 partitions through windows installer disk, but neither are formatted and I don't know how, i get no prompts to place ubuntu into either it just runs with it. I think I'm in over my head but its too late for that now, I've come this far and won't quit till either myself or my machine burst into spontaneous combustion...so-
Ubuntu is telling me it can't open:
usplash_write
...an I'm getting a squashfs errors like...
sb_bread failed reading block
unable to read fragment cache
unable to read inode...
-this is from a live cd boot. when attempting a straight install, i get a fuzzy green screen and it does nuthing as explained 2 topics down...(why was that locked btw? We weren't done yet!) I have no idea if my partitions are set correctly, since I've never done this before....please help!

My advice is to start fom scratch

do the following...

1. Boot to your XP CD...
2. When u get to the partitions screen DELETE ALL EXISTING PARTITIONS!!
3. create 1 partition for xp, Leave the rest of your space "Unallocated"
4. Go through XP install
5. After XP is installed.. Put in Ubuntu install cd (Not the Live one u were using) It's called the "desktop cd". I suggest downloading the latest version from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
6. Follow instructions until u get to the partitioner
7. Arrow down until FREE SPACE is highlighted, press enter
8. Choose Automatically create partitions based on free space
9. Click Finish changes and write to disk
10. Ubuntu will install
11. It will then find XP and then configure the dualboot for u.

Good luck