Uhhh, the presence of a filesystem would tell it that something is installed. Assuming that’s how the process in the installer works.
OK went home on lunch. Ubuntu booted off a flash drive can see the files fine so what I’m ultimately going to do is back them up and just reformat the bastard. I tried bootrec.exe from the Vista disk. /fixmbr says it worked. I rebooted and got non system disk error insert system disk blah blah blah. So I tried bootrec.exe /fixboot and it comes back with some sort of “not found” error or something. I tried the other bootrec options and they can see the install just fine but can’t do anything about it.
I could probably keep fucking around and get the boot loader fixed but I’ve been thinking about upgrading to windows 7 anyway so now’s as good a time as any for a clean format and reload.
Thanks all.