I heard that support for Vista was/is finished I thought I would try Linux. I already had an UBUNTU 8.04 disk so tried that. I greatly dislike it and tried to reinstall Vista from the recover disk but it just TELLS me the partition needs to be formatted to NTFS. Might be a senior moment, but I have no idea how to do this? Tried clicking on repair on the Vista disc but did not show the partition.
Any SUGGESTIONS how I can get Vista back on the computer and get rid of Ubuntu please?
I am guessing Linux is the right place to put this question?

Computer is:
Dell Inspiron 1525 You may need to contact Dell and see if that have a recovery media or you.
An installation of Linux on a Windows computer often destroys Windows information stored on the disk.
Can you locate the COA on the computer?
It might look like this:



Thanks for your reply Geek.
Old age and ignorance has won through. I tried the Vista INSTALL disk again and saw "format" It would not do it so tried "Delete". After that was able to reinstall Vista. Much HAPPINESS and need of a pint of ale now. Well, you did it yourself!
For reference:
It seems that Linux interferes with the way Vista and Windows wants a hard drive partitioned. The answer is to delete all partitions and start from a blank drive.
Nevertheless, it is possible to set up a hard drive with both Linux and Windows in a dual-boot. It has been well-documented elsewhere.