Norton Ghost 2003 , messed up my MBR and made its own. HOW TO RECOVER

So I'm not asking for help here, I'm going to tell all you guys about my little run in with norton ghost 2003 and what it did to my PC, and how I FIXED it.


So,
An old IDE drive of ours needs to be cloned,right. I setup two externals, one of those in an IDE slave box, and one a SATA HDD in a slave box.
Great, now NG2k3 should just clone my IDE onto a sata and boom im done.
Ya, i was done all right.
Lost my XP partition after NG wrote a partition and set it to active boot.
So im trying to get into windows after the clone and the ONLY partition that came up with this BS DOS crap that NG had put on my HDD...

So after trying countless times to boot off of an XP recovery CD and f around with the fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk and what not what not, getting no progress wse, I figured I'd upgrade my system to linux.

Not really upgrade, but let grub install and allow my windows partition to be accessible through there.

I installed ubuntu, which is great.

Now I can boot into winblows and have ubuntu in my back pocket if need be.

Just thought Id take the time to hopefully save someone else a few days of dispair, since the fourms is always where I look for help.

I wont check this much
so shoot an email to jnuss04@gmail.com if need be.

Peace