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.

The first fold

As with so much in the world the first fold is the most important, you get the first fold even slightly misaligned or creased and you can forget getting fold 20 correct.

Well like the other billion folk in web universe i thought id better get a blog, well not just that, i do think i have something worth while to share. But Ive never been one to read other peoples random thoughts and so you wont get read many of mine (as if anyone really would want to anyways).

Its just that i do come across ways of doing things (in a coder by trade) that is new to me, interesting and sometimes useful, and so i thought i might as well share them with people, and maybe if I'm lucky they will find things useful that i found useful, we'll see. Actually the most useful thing i find about blogs are the comments, some guy tells you to solve a particular problem in this way on his blog and you see 10 posts below discussing the pro's and con's of the approach, that's what i like, there is never just one way round a problem, i like to see the other side of the fold before making that first crease.