General :: Can't Boot After Installing Upgrades

After fighting with Windows for many years I finally decided to try Linux; still so new at it, I am practically still in the package and just picking my way out.

I have a 1.8Ghz AMD and 6HDDs on an ASRock K8Upgrade Board with 1GB of RAM, running XP Pro. Two of the drives are 500GB SATA drives. I installed Ubuntu10.4 on the first SATA drive (two partitons) and until yesterday it worked just fine.

Yesterday I decided to finally use the update manager to update the system and installed 201+MB of upgrades. Somewhere along the way a window popped up showing my HDDs with check-marks beside the 'C' drive and the 2 SATA drives. I was asked if I wanted to install Grub; I take it that is the boot-loader, on all the drives so, I checked all the drives and then read on. Further down I was told that, putting grub on all the drives would make it unreliable so, I unchecked all the drives but the 2 SATA drives.

Now, when I boot up, I get the option to boot into XP or Ubuntu but, when I choose Ubuntu, the machine just gives me a black screen and reboots endlessly. I suspect, by un-checking the 'C' drive in the above mentioned window, I somehow deleted or incapacitated the boot-loader.

I have lots of instances of Grub in various locations, mostly recycle bins but, are they useful and, what do I do with them? Here is one:

#This file is modified at runtime by bootmenu.nsh
set default=0
echo "$(title1)"
echo "$(title2)"
if sleep --verbose --interruptible 5 ; then
set timeout=0

[Code]....