Problems in installing grub on Ubuntu's partition

Ok, after installing ubuntu on sda7 (that is (hd0,6)), I am having troubles in installing grub on the boot sector of that partition. I chose not to install grub in the MBR not to spoil Vista's bootloader (Ubuntu did not give the option for installing it in its own partition(.

First thing, I lack the grub directory under boot.
If I try to install grub by doing this

Code:

grub
grub> root (hd0,6)

I get a non existing disk error.
Should I try a setup (hd0,6) nonetheless?
What is the procedure to create the grub directory with the stage1 and stage2 content?
The man and info pages, and the grub webpages are unclear to me. They seem to assume that stage1 is already in the boot partition.

Yesterday I booted in my Kanotix install, that has grub on the boot sector of sda6 and tried a

Code:

grub-install /dev/sda7

and it seemed to work fine. It said it had installed grub but... there is no grub directory and I still have to use the Kanotix grub to boot into ubuntu.

I installed grub, and grub-docs from within Ubuntu itself just to make sure I had all the components on the same disk. I used Synaptics, everything went fine. I have grub installed, I have the docs, but there is no usr/share/grub directory from where to copy the stage1, stage2 and conf files to place under boot/grub. There is no friggin' stage1 file on my Ubuntu disk.
(I wanted to try a modified version of this: http://linuxgazette.net/issue64/kohli.html

Am I utterly stupid or there is a small dark spot in grub's documentation?

 

No you are not being stupid, Grub is a PITA to install. Have you tried booting into your Ubuntu distro and then running grub-install from within Ubuntu.

Running grub-install from your other distro will not work, unless you mount your Ubuntu's root partition somewhere and then tell grub-install to use that instead of the other distro's root partition.

You are also supposed to be able to install grub from it's own grub shell, but I don't think I ever succeeded in using that method. I have to hang my head in shame, because I spent a whole weekend working out a procedure to install grub as part of my recovery strategy and I've lost my notes:-(

 

Solved!
I simply copied the /boot/grub directory from my kanotix install (especially the stage1, stage2, menu.lst files, the latter modified in order to default ubuntu's kernel loading) and - as root - I gave:

Code:

grub
grub> root (hd0,6)
grub> setup (hd0,6)

After that I added with BCEdit the entry for Ubuntu in Vista's bootloader.
By choosing that entry I get into grub for ubuntu, albeit with the kanotix splash screen.


Can someone please upload the content of Ubuntu 7.10 boot directory? No need for the kernel images: only the splash images and the content of the grub directory are needed (especially the menu.lst, since I am now booting vmlinux.*:generic and I lack the failsafe kernel pointer.