Did you see my post about virtualization? I would just do that if your going to do a reinstall d/l sun virtual box and install it on there. You will have the full function of the OS. Very nice tool. I have 3 virtual machines that i run for work to do testing things. The best part is you can backup the vdi just incase something goes wrong and you can import it back into the console and you are up and running. You can also take a snapshot of the current state that way if you d/l something and it messes up your machine you can just roll it back. If you would like to do this and have any questions just ask i can help you out
You can also do this for you unbuntu machine as well you can make a ghost copy of the machine using ghost 11 or hawkpe do a disk to image and once you got the image got to vbox and boot from either ghost or hawkpe and push the image very fast and very clean install