Reinstalling grub?

[John DeDourek]

Knute Johnson wrote:
>>>Robert:
>>>
>>>Is there a step missing?  That all works but it still boots WinXP not 
>>>grub.
>>
>>Nothing is missing as far as writing the GRUB loader to the MBR but 
>>those steps assume that grub.conf is intact. (Which it should be if
>>nothing has happened except re-installing WinXP.)
>>
> 
> 
> The grub.conf file is just like it should be.  I'm stuck as to what 
> to try next.
> 
I seem to recall that on one machine that was behaving that way,
I fixed the problem by changing the partition that was marked
"active" using a tool like partition magic.  But should this
matter to grub???