Okay so yesterday I had my friend chase partition my harddrive and put Ubuntu on there. So on Patrick's laptop we'd be able to boot Windows Vista (ick, we need 7) OR Linux Ubuntu. I watched him and it seemed he did everything correctly, I only didn't do it because I haven't partitioned a hard drive since 2000 and wasn't confident about doing it.

Anyways so now WIndows Visa won't load. It asks for a system restore but can't do that because there are no save points and the only way it looks like it will be fixed is to reformat. Ubuntu will work if you load it from the disk and not the boot screen and you use to "try it" not to install it.

From what I'm gathering somehow I'm missing sbin, which is a BIG FREAKIN DEAL and I have no idea what to do to correct that.

HELP (robb....)

Your friend partitioned the drive alright, but he didn't do it right. Essentially he just split the drive without moving the windows files first to one part of it so he wouldn't wipe them.

But he didn't do that, in short, you're fucked. Format the entire drive, wipe everything. Then using something like gparted from an iso split the drive down the middle. Then install windows on one partition first, and after that install ubuntu on the other.