ok, seriously dont know where to start, but here go,s.
older acer aspire 5610 z lap top.
dual boot win vista home/ and ubuntu 10.0(latest#) what ever it is.

anyways, never got any restore disks with this computer only a vista upgrade disk.


the thing has been running terminaly slow these day,s so i figured i would just format the c: drive and load up win xp since I have a copy not being used on any of my working computers.

so i go into ubuntu, use the disk management thing, format the c: drive. then go to load win xp, but instead of booting from the disk drive, i get the choose boot option. it has no mention of the disk drive, so I picked something referring to windows as a posed to dev/ what ever, and to my astonishment it loaded the lap top back to the day I bought it.
well I was confused but non the less happier since I still had my xp to use is case of another gota nuke this thing situation.

did all ( well some of the updates), had to do the restart thing, but was doing domestic stuff when it rebooted.
by defualt it would boot into ubuntu, but apparently when I nuked the C: drive I must have took out the boot sector or some thing for ubuntu, cause all i get is a bunch of computer jargan i dont understand, and a command prompt.

i want to reinstall ubuntu but i cant seem to figure out how to get rid of all the Dev/ stuff.

I have the option of doing a side by side install, but wont this take up more space? or will ubuntu know to use the space it used on the last install that isn't working?

where was this back up of vista stored? Ive always thought 30 gigs for an os was kinda brutal! and their is not any recovery partition that Ive ever seen.

anyways, if anyone has the time and knowledge to explain as to what transpiered and how to regain my dev/ partition preferably using the ubuntu disk(well usb stick) I would appreciate it.

theirs no info on the dev partition Im worried about so thats not an issue. in advance, thanks. ward.