I had Puppylinux 2.0 installed in my hdd (/dev/hdb8) along with other distros and windows (in /dev/hada) with xosl as boot manager. The grub loader was installed in the root of the partition. While working in Puppy, the power supply went off and the system booted on its own but I could not log in to Puppy. All I get is a single word GRUB on the screen.

I tried to reinstall Puppy but the same problem continued. Then I deleted all the partitions in /dev/hdb and used Puppy cd to install afresh. Still the problem persists. I am confuzzled as to how a fresh install could not delete the earlier grub and write it afresh so that I can boot Puppy properly.

Any pointers please ?

It's called the master boot record and it's normally where grub installs itself unless you do some extra tricks to tell it otherwise. You can reformat all you want, but until you can get the master boot record updated, it won't change anything.

It sounds like you are in grub and it doesn't have the commands it needs to boot. Those commands look like:

root (hd0,?)
initrd /boot/?
kernel /path/and/name/of/kernel other options here
boot

Google around for a good menu.lst from your distro and see if you can use it to get it booted.