Triple boot install problems and reinstall of GRUB

My main dev machine at home is a triple boot, XP, Vista, Ubuntu machine currently with Ubuntu 8.10, and XP Pro installed. I recently added a new hard drive and had all sorts of problems with getting the boot sequences sorted out.

In a very breif nutshell this is what i did to fix it.

1st get vista booting again

To do this i used the vista boot disk and selected the repair your computer option followed by startup repair, i think i had to reboot and do it again as far as i recall but it did it in the end.

Finally reinstalled grub

First i used my ubuntu live cd and in a console ran

$ sudo grub

This puts you into a grub shell.

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

This will return a value which looks like (hd?, ?) this is where you will find /boot/grub. '?' will point to the specific partition of your disc which contains the boot grub for example (hd0,1)

grub> root (hd?,?)

Use the value from the find command eg (hd0,1)

Finally the command which will install GRUB into the MBR.

grub> setup (hd?)
grub> quit

Reboot and my Boot menu worked again :-) yay

Hopefully this will help someone.