I know what I did wrong during the install: I mounted the /boot device on sda3 because I had literally no idea where to put it (no docs I had available could tell me), and sda3 is a big fat32 (so it's not so bad a location) partition where I intend to put all my mp3 files and movies, to be accessible to both Win XP MCE and Mandriva 2006 (x86 64).

The location of grub has been confirmed by the rescue mode of the Mandriva cd: its (hda0,5) because I also have an old IDE drive with 2 partitions, making the 2hda's + 3 sda's =5. So my original boot.ini and ntldr are still fine (and I've got other copies for safety elsewhere).

I'd really like to simply edit my boot.ini in the tiny sda at the very beginning of the sata drive (47MB) so that it will boot from the ntldr but still leave the win bootloader 'clean' as a guy called six in the ubuntu forums.org writes in his howto:

"Why not just use Grub? Well, firstly Grub typically resides on the MBR,and booting through Windows leaves your MBR "clean" with the default Windows NTLDR boot loader. (Some AV's are reported to not like anything
else taking over the MBR)". Yes, I've got a fair amount of system admin tools, software, and semi-exotic hardware that might get fussy.

Failing that solution, run an approrpriate mandriva command from that I can use in the rescue mode to move the /boot device from sda3 to sda (I believe this is linux's naming for where my win boot files are, that tiny fat16)

If I remember correctly from last night, choices for the /boot device were hd?, hda? sda, sda2 (there was no choice for sda1, probably becuase that's the win ntfs os partition), sda3, sda6...Certainly the native ext3 partitions are on sda6, sda7, and sda9.

Or should I just reinstall from the Mandriva CD?

Any kind souls out there who can help with either of these solutions? I'm so excited to actually get some brand of linux installed, and would really like to start enjoying it!

Thanks in advance for reading and/or replying...

Mmmm - I doubt that a re-install will be any more successful.
You have a lot more confidence in what you "know" happened than I do.

What say you get the Mandy rescue system rebooted, and let us see the (*full*) output of the following commands;(that's a lower case ell for the fdisk).