[PLUG] Question on Grub and fixing the MBR

[logical american]

  I tried installing Ubuntu 10.10 maverick edition on an old system, but 
ran into trouble with the MBR and grub

I get the infamous grub error 17 which means that it cannot find the 
partition.

I have 4 disks, 2 scsi and 2 ide:

sda is ide 40 Gb   /home
sdb is ide 120 Gb /boot /swap /all others /backup
sdc is scsi 38 Gb /spare
sdd is scsi 18 Gb /dos /win98 /winbck

I tried running "grub-install /dev/sdb" command while running the Ubuntu 
CD live and that took.  I did set the boot flag on sdb3 partition (and 
sdd2).

But when I tried to run "update-grub > grub.cfg in the /boot/grub folder 
area, the command fails and says "cannot find /, dev mounted?"  But aufs 
is mounted as "/"

Of course, not having this fixed, I cannot boot the system.

Would using knoppix 6.2 to at least boot to a working OS do a better job?

I am not sure how to fix this problem, when the only working system is a 
live CD.  Has anyone had this problem and what did you do to fix it?

Randall