grub refuses to grub

[Don W. Jenkins]

I managed to solve a lingering problem I've had with my freezing display 
after narrowing it pretty much to a hardware problem in the mother 
board.  I had a new ASUS P4S800 sitting around that I wasn't using, so I 
swapped it in today, so I have that and a Celeron 2.4 gig, 512mb of 
memory, Nvidia FX 5200 video card, Proxim Orinoco wifi card, a 30 gig HD 
for Windows and 60 gig HD for Linux, a regular CDROM and a CDRW.  I was 
pleased to find that everything booted, got detected and worked the 
first time, and there appears to be no problem with the display now.  It 
was freezing in everything, including Windows, gradually worsening. But 
what I can't do any more is get Grub to boot the machine.  No matter 
which distro I try to install and have install Grub, when I try the 
reboot, I get an "error 25" whatever that is, and the boot process just 
stops.  For some reason Grub isn't able to pass off to the second HD 
where the actual boot sector is, and I gather, where the actual Grub 
menu is to select Windows.  To complicate things, I cannot get Linux to 
rewrite my MBR, because I have Win2000 Server installed, which uses 
NTFS, which does not allow write permission from Linux.  And I don't 
recall, or never knew how to rewrite the MBR from fdisk on a Windows 
boot disk.  I've even tried to get Win 2000 to reinstall, but it is 
doing funky things at the point where it is supposed to reboot and 
continue the install.  It just keeps going around again if the CD is in 
the ROM, and if it is out, Grub is still in the way.  It hasn't 
rewritten the MBR yet.  If I try the Linux boot floppy, it hangs at the 
point where it would hand off to the boot sector on the second HD, also. 

Does this ring any bells?  I'm probably going to have to wipe the 
Windows partition and do a clean install, and maybe the same for the 
Linux side.  Or since I have a Win XP laptop, I may just make this a 
Linux machine and forget the dual boot. 

Thanks,
Don J.