Hello, please explain your exact problems and it helps to know the computer type, ram, etc
I have been playing with grub alot in portable-tinycore-2.0, I am right now trying to finish
1st portable-multidistro; it's a partitioned (6, 3 p, 3 l, with swap) with 6 partitions and I made it 1.6GB so it'll fit on my 2gb stick.
so far, I got tc2.0, tinyme-droplet frugal, pupflux412 full install, tinyflux1.0 full install, MyDSL-4.4.10, webconverger-4.9,
webserverpuppy1 frugal and I'm trying to find other little frugal distro's too.
I had to install grub manually for most of those, which taught me a great deal about grubster.
I suggest you make multiple partition qemu-img, use portable qemu for windows/linux
and install some stuff and try to do grub manaually
(
http://multidistro.com/downloads/portables/portables.html )
not all distro's run on a linux box, deb/ubuntu, but most others do(tc-1.4.3 doesn't but runs on windows?!)
slack, slack-based, tc-2.0, dsl,feather, tinyflux, tinyme, grml, austrumi, lots of others.
using portable you can practice hacking vhd's and "rescuing" them with pmagic/clonezilla,etc
so, check it out
also, did you use normal grub prompt
root (hdx,x)
setup (hdx)
quit
or did you use "grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/hdxx /dev/hdx"
please provide more info...