I have a question about the best way to get my ubuntu system up and running again. First up some background. I had xp loaded a long-time ago and tried vista as a dual boot xp / vista machine. hated vista so used the disk to load ubuntu and was left with a machine that went from grub to vista loader that then loaded xp. this was no problem so i left it alone. Right, upgraded ubuntu to jaunty and I managed to mess up my login screen and ended up doing a clean install of jaunty. grub went ok, at least it looked ok, had an entry for windows at bottom of menu.lst and ubuntu ran fine but when trying to load vista loader so i could get to xp it would not load. ended up using easybcd to dump the vista loader so now my pc boots up into xp now problem. However, I don't want it to run xp all the time, yes my wife prefers xp but i don't! So my question is, without doing another reinstall of jaunty, how can i get my system to look for grub and get my nice little grub chooser to give me what ever OS i want? I know that all my ext3 partitions are ok so it is just a case of getting grub back in charge instead of xp from the mbr!

You can boot your machine using your distro DVD and going into recovery mode or just a USB boot stick and restore GRUB into the MBR of your hard drive.

I use LILO, so I've never done exactly this myself, but the concept is the same.

This article is a bit dated but should suffice:
http://www.sorgonet.com/linux/grubrestore/

Or, here is another:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351

Perfect! many thanks foodown, just what I needed. I had done some searches but always had in my mind that I was probably going to re-install. GRUB is a bit of a dark art to me, the rest of linux I am pretty happy with, i must learn more about how it works.
Mark