I found the problem and a solution (no goat needed <G> ).  I did try to use supergrub, and while it is a good tool and partially worked, I was still have problems.

the problem was that I was reusing a couple disks that had been set up as a raid 1 in a different system.  I was under the wrong assumpion that removing all the partitions would clear the raid metadata from the drives.  This was wrong.  Windows seemed to have no problem however installing on those drives (able to install, boot, etc).

I decided to clear one of the disks for a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10.  The install disk would not even see the drive, only the raid data.  I used the Ubuntu live disk to run dmraid and remove the raid data sets from the disks.  At that point the Ubuntu install was able to see the disk and installed normally.

I was expecting that the windows install on the other raided disk would be borked, but fortunatly that was not the case.  One unexpected side affect was that the new install was now able to pick up all three OS boots (win7, XP, and Ubuntu 9.10)

Lesson learned.....  be sure to COMPLETELY clear the hard drives, especially if they have been used in a raid set.

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 4:49 AM, kitepilot@kitepilot.com <kitepilot@kitepilot.com> wrote:
How you booted before is irrelevant.

You need to:
Verify that you only have one bootable drive (fdisk -l /dev/yada).
Verify that your BIOS is set to boot from that bootable drive.

Boot with a CD, GRML is good, but Supergrub will bail you out of most
situations.
Not all...   :)
There are pretty comprehensive GRUB instructions at:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter08/grub.html

Run:
grub
root (hd0,0) (assuming first HD)
setup (hd0)

MAKE SURE THAT THE STAGES WERE FOUND!

Verify that /boot/grub/menu.lst matches what you just did.
Pray.
Sacrifice a goat.
BOOT!
Enjoy...    :)
ET




Steve Phariss writes:

> First my current set up (WAY too many disks with diffrent OS's)
>
> Sata1: Old install of windows 7 blew away with a reload.
> Sata2: Ubuntu 9.04
> Sata3: XP/Ubuntu 8
> Sata4: Centos
>
> What happened is that I re-installed Windows 7 on a working dual-boot
> system, Of course it blew away my working grub boot loader as expected.  I
> made the mistake of not documenting where I installed grub.
>
> I would like to restore dual boot (and access to ubuntu 9.04), but when I
> tried with the Ubuntu live disk, I could not find the correct boot loader
> location.  If need be I can reload ubuntu, but there are some things on the
> ubuntu 9.04 disk I would like to keep so I would have to back them up. (not
> a problem so much, just a pain.)
>
> I am able to access all the hard drives/partitions.
>
> Steve Phariss
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