Booting from CD Hangs

I have had Ubuntu on my laptop for a while now, and I was trying to set up a dual-boot with xp. My partition layout was such: An ext3 boot partition, a 40gb NTFS partition set aside for xp, a 160gb ext3 home partition for linux, and an ext3 partition that linux runs from. Upon putting in a known working xp boot disc, the screen hangs (without ever displaying anything except a blinking cursor) on boot until I eject the cd, whereupon it promptly loads grub. Thinking this to be a grub/xp clash, I rashly deleted the ext3 boot partition and formatted it for windows, but the problem persists (though now grub gets an error 17 while trying to load). Any ideas on how I can get both of these OSs working? Thanks.

Shouldn't the disc start loading at all? From what I have seen around the web, it should load the drivers stuffs then hang. If this is the issue, is there any way to avoid formatting all of my partitions? Note that I have tried formatting the ext3 boot partition to no avail.