tried to partition vista/ubuntu, lost 83gb of my hd

The Ubuntu installer was able to shrink down your Windows system by about 83 GB, even though it wasn't able to finish installing itself. So, you need to:

(1) Remove any new partitions that Ubuntu created after the end of the newly shrunken-down NTFS partition. The NTFS partition (or partitions) belong to your Windows system, so don't delete it/those. Also, if you see FAT32 and/or FAT16 partitions, don't mess with those either. A default installation of Ubuntu creates two such partitions, the second much smaller than the first. It's possible that Ubuntu wasn't able to create these partitions (or that it was able to create one but not the other), so in that case you might skip, or partially skip, this step.

(2) If the operation you just completed deleted partitions out of an "extended partition" (which a kind of "super partition", serving as containers for partitions), and the extended partition is now empty, then delete the extended partition. If the extended partition is not empty (for example, if it also contains your Windows partition), then do *not* delete it.

(3) "Stretch out" your Windows partition (the largest, and probably rightmost, NTFS partition) to its original size (i.e. to take up the entire physical disk, to the right).

There are two ways to accomplish all three of these steps:

(1) If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can safely repartition the system drive with the Disk Manager, though you'll probably asked to reboot to complete the operations (which is OK). Right click My Computer and click Manage, or click the start menu, type "diskmgmt.msc" (without the quotes) into the text box, and press enter. This will enable you to examine your physical disk, see the partitions on it, remove partitions, and resize partitions.

(2) If you have an earlier version of Windows, then the Disk Manager doesn't have this functionality. In that case, you can do this with GParted. To do that, boot from the Ubuntu Desktop Install CD, select Try Ubuntu, and go to System > Administration > GParted Partition Editor. If you have to delete partitions, and you went with the defaults during your installation attempt, then the big partition (if it exists) will be of type ext4, and the small partition after that (if it exists) will be of type linux-swap. If you feel like using this method instead of method #1 even on a Windows Vista or Windows 7 system, that's OK. (Method #1 will only work on Windows Vista and Windows 7 systems, but this method will no matter what Windows system you're running.)

If you find that you need additional assistance with either of these methods, please feel free to post again.

Occasionally data loss occurs when attempting to dynamically resize partitions, so if you have any important data (e.g. documents) on your Windows system that hasn't been backed up, you should make sure to back them up before performing this procedure. That is the case whether you use the Disk Manager or GParted.