Help with bad partition after vista install

finchx6

Alright, well like curious george, I installed one of the beta releases (RC1 I believe) of Windows Vista to get an idea of its layout. I had it installed for about 4 hours before literally saying, "Ok... I've seen enough...I'm going back to my dual boot of XP and Ubuntu." Unfortunately, I'm not able to reinstall Ubuntu. I formatted (using the XP CD) and installed XP as usual. Then, I installed Paragon Partitioner to set up my linux swap and ext3 partitions on my primary harddrive so that I could once again have Ubuntu. BUT, when I open Paragon's partitioner up, where it typically shows the size and file system on each harddrive, my entire primary drive (which is the one I need to partition off and install Ubuntu on, which is also the drive Vista was on) comes up as, "Invalid." It lists the overall size of the HDD, but does not show the graphical representation of the amount of space used, nor does it list any kind of file system. Only, "Invalid." I've formatted and reinstalled XP three times, with the same problem each time. XP runs fine, without any errors whatsoever, but as long as Paragon sees the file system as being invalid, I'm unable to create my linux partition, and I'm not aware of any other free non-destructive partitioning software that might still allow the partitions to be created. Has anyone else run into this, have any ideas of how to fix it, or does anyone have any ideas as to why, after installing and then formatting Vista, the drive's file system is no longer valid in the first place??