Jiffy,
(1.) My suggestion.
==> I have used the Parted-Magic Live-CD (on bootup. select the "Extras" menu) to install grub.
The On-Boot Extras menu includes
(a) HDD Detection,
(b) Super Grub Disk 1,
(c) Super Grub Disk 2,
(d) MHDD (?),
(e) Plop Boot Manager (?).
Only available at On-Boot Live-CD time.
Running from the HD, booting from a running grub, will bypass this Extras menu.
(!) I have been keeping a Parted-Magic Live-CD beside the computer because it enables me to recover from a "mucking" session. Patrick Verneer has done a fine soft-ware engineering project with this.
(2.) Puppy 5.25 has an application for installing grub and grub4dos. Can be done from the Live-CD.
(3.) I use grub4dos on my "sand-box" computer, with 7 Linux OS, installed to sda0, a dedicated "Boot-Code" partition. Works as advertised. Looks very M$-DOS, like the old days.
(4.) I use grub2 on my XP/Ubuntu computer
(also with TinyCore and Parted-Magic OS copied into the WP ntfs partition)
and it runs as advertised. Nice graphic splash options.
buena suerta,
glene77is