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Hard disk boot sector invalid
When you get this error when you boot your com­puter, you know some­thing is ter­ribly wrong.
Actu­ally, in most cases it’s not. What prob­ably happened was that you did not have set a boot­able par­ti­tion on your boot­ing hard disk.
How can one not set a par­ti­tion as boot­able? It can happen when you install a fresh Linux dis­tri­bu­tion using the manual par­ti­tion­ing option, and you shame­lessly forgot to toggle the boot­able flag on your Linux par­ti­tion. How­ever, this implies that you already got rid of WXP, so you are totally excused.
Another reason for the boot­able flag miss­ing is that you have erased the said par­ti­tion and recre­ated it.

How do you set the boot­able flag again?
You can boot with a install­a­tion CD/rescue CD and set it using the par­ti­tion­ing tool. There is no need to install again.
Since you already have Linux installed, you can boot with the Ubuntu install­a­tion CD and choose the last option, Boot from first hard disk, to boot of Linux. Then, use the dis­tri­bu­tion par­ti­tion­ing tool to set the boot­able flag.
Update 23Feb07: The boot­able flag has to be set on one of the primary par­ti­tions. It does not work if you set the boot­able flag on a logical par­ti­tion. Appar­ently the above error mes­sage comes from the BIOS, which blindly does an unneeded check to see if a primary par­ti­tion (whatever primary par­ti­tion) has the boot­able flag set. The primary par­ti­tion you set the flag on does not have to be a par­ti­tion that you can boot from. Any primary par­ti­tion will suf­fice. Once the BIOS relin­quishes con­trol to the MBR, GRUB takes over and brings you to your Linux distribution.

Tags: general //