Help with grub...

[cyberbot at softhome.net]

Hello ubuntu-users, 

I read an article about Ubuntu Linux last week, and visited the
website to find out more. After reading a bit I downloaded the
warty-rc-install-amd64.iso an burned the CD. 

I proceeded to install Ubuntu and all seemed to go well, however after
the install I discovered that grub had missed picking up that I have
WindowsXP Pro installed on my machine. As a result I could not boot
into Windows. The only options in the grub menu are the four Ubuntu
boot options! Luckily I had a floppy laying around with the bootloader
knows as GAG on it which I had previously played around with and it
was already setup to allow me to boot into XP. 

The two hard drives are a Western Digital and a Maxtor. Both are
160Gigs. The WD has C: D: and F: partitions with WindowsXP located on
the C: partition. The Maxtor has G: H: I: J: and K: partitions. 

I chose the manual option to format partition J: on the Maxtor to
install Ubuntu. The Ubuntu install seemed to be doing fine and after
the install I booted into Ubuntu. After playing around with it for a
good while, I rebooted the computer only to boot back into Ubuntu! I
rebooted again and brought up the grub menu only to find that
WindowsXP does not exist there? Apparently the Ubuntu installation
sees the WD hard drive as hdc and the Maxtor as hdd and/or hd0 and
hd1. 

I have been using computers for many years. I have tinkered with and
become very familiar with many OS's in the past including the AmigaOS,
WinBlows of various flavors, QNX, MacOS, etc. As a result I'm fairly
competent at many things, however I have never used grub before. I had
installed Mandrake in the past but I chose to use Lilo as the
bootloader while using it. I'm not really sure how to edit the grub
menu.lst to get WindowsXP to show up and boot XP by default. I looked
over the menu.lst over and kind of got an idea as to what to do, but I
am unable to edit the file. I have tried using sudo during various
attempts at editing this file, but it is read only and I can't edit
it. I tried using sudo to set a password for root and it seemed to
work, but even logged in as root I cannot edit the file or change the
properties because it says I'm not the owner even though I'm logged in
as root. :/ 

My machine has an Athlon64 3400+, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, 1Gig of
Kingston Ram, an Asus K8V-SE deluxe motherboard, two 160Gig hard
drives on different controllers, a Sony DRU-530A DVD RW and a floppy
drive. 

I'm pretty much a Linux noob even though I have tinkered around with
Mandrake before. Can someone tell me what I need to do to edit the
grub menu.lst and what I need to add there to get WindowsXP in the
menu and have it boot as the default OS? 

I got a reply from bugzilla saying that the issue I was having was a
know bug on the AMD 64 platform, that it had been fixed upstream and
that it would be fixed as soon as the Ubuntu team merge Debian
unstable into Hoary. It was also suggested that I post to this mailing
list for help. I was told that I should be able to edit menu.lst with
sudo, although if it happens to be read-only then I might have to
write the file forcibly and was advised for help on force writing the
file and the correct menu.lst syntax to ask here. 

All I have at this time is the basic Ubuntu install and the apps,
editors, etc. that it installs by default. I do like the looks of it,
and I think Ubuntu has a very bright future. :) 

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. At the moment the
only way I can boot into XP is to use the GAG bootloader disk. :/ 

regards, 

Lee