Success!
I have a few things to report, for anyone that is interested.
When Vista sees two empty drives upon install, it hijacks the one that you want to leave empty, formatting it as NTFS and putting some boot log file on it.
solution: unplug HDD#2 from mobo when installing Vista.
Vista is very unfriendly towards grub.
solution:
how to:dual boot Vista and Linux
What I did differed from what was listed there: for some reason, my SATA drives are not recognized as sd*/* drives, but rather hd*/* drives. Strange.
I need to sleep. This Linux noob took a whole friggin' weekend to set up a dual boot Vista/Linux PC, but it's finally done!!!