i think i made a mistake here. when i got ubuntu nobody told me that a version of itunes had not been made for ubuntu, and since i formatted my hard drive in the process of installing ubuntu i can't just go back to win 7. i tried using the win 7 disk but i was told that since my hard drive was formatted as fat 32 instead of ntsc i would need to reformat it by hooking it up to another computer as an external hard drive, but i don't have an adapter for that. when i connect my ipod it also says "unable to mount ipod".
you don't need to hook it up to another computer to reformat it. If you put in the win7 disk and set bios to boot from the cd drive, the windows installation should let you reformat to ntsc and install win7 again. if not, an xp disk will work as well.