Kalyway install on T60, probably SOL

[corticalaxon]

I have a t60 thinkpad, core 2 duo merom 2 ghz, 80 gb hard drive, 2 gb ram, 128 mb mrx1400.

 

Before, I had windows vista home premium on a 55 gb partition, 13 gb hardy heron, 5 gb of that extra critical system tools partition, and a 695 mb linux swap.

 

I tried to install leopard 10.5.2 kalyway. when in vista, i went into disk management and i decided to write over the ubuntu install. so i right clicked on that partition and clicked delete. i then did the same for the swap, so the 13ish gb showed up in green as "free space." I think I made a huge mistake here, as I should have formatted them, instead of deleting them. When I went back into the kalyway install cd disk utility, that extra 13 gb i should have had didn't show up. And what is unfortunate is that I was then unable to get into windows because the GRUB bootloader is still the default, even though I deleted the partition.

 

So I went into leopard installer disk utility again, and (wow, quite foolishly) reformatted my 55 gb windows partition (inaccessible because of GRUB error 22) as mac os journaled extended. I tried to install os x on this partition, and I applied the customizations that seemed to be right and that some tutorials prescribed, but when I get to the installation stage, it says OS X cannot be installed because of a "BaseSystem" error.

 

And when I restarted with the vista cd and tried to install, the hard drive doesn't show up (presumably because it's formatted in Mac OS Journaled Extended).

 

So, I can't install an OS from Mac os, which is the one that recognizes the Journaled partition of 55gb, and I lost my windows partition (which is not that much of a biggy, as I have my information backed up), and GRUB is overriding everything and may prevent access to windows even though the ubuntu partition was deleted?

 

I plan to use disk utility to reformat that 55 gb back to ntfs, then hopefully vista will recognize it and I'll be able to install it. Does this seem like a sound plan? I'm assuming that by installing windows, the windows bootloader will resume the first position and grub will lose its obstructive grasp.

 

If I do get into windows, how would I be able to find that last 25 gb?

 

And last of all, how would I be able to fix that "basesystem" error while trying to install kalyway?

[corticalaxon]

Edit: I seem to have run into an issue, as using disk utility I can't reformat the 55gb partition back into ntfs...only to the mac versions of partitions or to MS-DOS, none of which would be usable to install windows, right?