If you are using Ubuntu & XP dual boot, & if at all you are planing to upgrade / have upgraded to Win7, this post may be helpful for you.
When you upgrade to Win7, due to Win’s unsocial behaviour to coexists with other OS, grub boot loader is lost.
Here we assume, when you installed xp partition was fat32. Later system upgraded to windows 7 with ntfs filesystem.
Due to MBR overwritten grub is missing, follow this link to recover.
Now on booting you’ll find XP in boot option instead of Win7. If you try booting with XP option, you’ll get error.
To fix it
goto ubuntu recovery mode
in recovery menu
select grub (Update grub bootloader)
reboot the system. All should be fixed.
Uptill XP, it was ok with windows overwrite MBR, but same behaviour with Win7 is bit annoying. Atleast now MS should respect other OS and should learn to coexist.