I made a stupid mistake

Laptop Dell Inspiron 1501.

I had a dual boot on this laptop between Ubuntu 10.10 and WinXP.
Now I tried the latest Ubuntu 14.10 and by mistake put it's Grub in the MBR and since I could't get a wireless out of it ,I removed it and yes,of course-no nothing anymore.
Realizing my mistake, I put in a small Ubuntu 10.10 root partition and put it's grub in the MBR.
So far,so good. Now how do I put the grub bootloader back in my full Ubuntu partition and in the MBR so I can delete that small Ubuntu partition that has no use for me except the fact it boots my whole system?
Here is my fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd0f4738c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 14 112423+ de Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 * 15 8482 68011193 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 8482 14202 45945857 5 Extended
/dev/sda4 14202 14594 3149272 db CP/M / CTOS / ...
/dev/sda5 * 10160 11196 8321024 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 11196 11578 3072000 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 11578 14202 21071872 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 9757 10160 3236864 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 8482 9756 10240234+ 83 Linux

I know it should be quite simple but I am still at a loss.

Never mind. I just wiped out every Ubuntu and installed Ubuntu 14.10, and it works. Some samba issues with my WinXP desktop (surprise,surprise!) but it will be ok I think. A bit slower than Ubuntu 10.10 though.

Please read this thread for answer to your original question

Thank you Saikee for the reply.
As I said in my previous post I just went to Ubuntu 14.10, and put its Grub2 in the MBR.
But I'll keep your post for future reference because hmm...you never know!

I have been using Linux since 1999, and so far have never failed to be able to repair a failure. Knock on wood! :D

Even years ago, probably 2005 I had a strange init problem in Mandrake (now Mandriva). I went into the init file with a live CD and commented at various points to I could tell by the messages where the failure was. When I figured out which line in init failed, I simply commented it out and it booted fine. That line made no sense anyway, not sure what it was there for.

Now, they have a compiled Init file, and I have no idea how to fix it if there is a problem.

Yes, Saki's thread on restoring the boot loader / Grub / etcetera is a very common failure and once you know how one of the easiest disasters to fix.

Thanks for your reply irlandes. And you're right, booting problems can always be fixed but I have to admit I was a little bit "distracted shall we say?" here and that's why I got into trouble.
Now on my laptop I just have a simple dualboot between Ubuntu 14.10 (now) and my old WinXP. On my Desktop I have 12 linuxes running and PCBSD and Solaris all running well. Now of course I don't use all those OS's ,just a few of them, the rest was just fun installing them and see them running.
I don't know if you have any experience with the latest Ubuntu, I have and I must say I am not that enthusiastic about it. It is slower than my good old Ubuntu 10.10 and gives me problems (samba, wireless printing). Maybe you have any thoughts about that?

I understand why you would have multiple boots. Saki is well known as the expert on multi-boots. I have done it, but for example when I had Scientific Linux with Kubuntu and XP I ran into boot problems. Can't remember why any more because that was a long time ago.

I liked the idea of Scientific Linux, but if you used the default repository settings, you got some really botched updates. You had to know to manually set up repository priorities before you updated it, which I found rather clumsy.

Right now I am still using Kubuntu LTS 12.04. it is so much work to install a new one completely. I do have extra partitions on this machine, so will probably do it some day for 14.04. But, not yet. I don't use samba nor wireless printing at all. So, I am of no help at all. Sorry.

I did a lot of dinking around with different distros in the past. But, after while it loses interest. So now I just want to use my machine for tasks I have to perform.

A few weeks ago my "grand-daughter" here in Mexico who is actually not kin at all needed a video in English of cooking something. So, I took my little Canon Sureshot and made several videos. Turns out there is a Ubuntu package which lets you mate separate videos into one smooth video. Gosh, I love Linux!

We were laughing when we made the video, because not one of the four of us knew how to do it. I told them we need to pray the others do even worse. They did, so she got a C.

You're right about one thing Irlandes, it takes a lot of time and effort to replace one distro with a recent one! Why do you think I stuck with my old Ubuntu 10.10 for almost 5 years? Because I knew I was going to have problem with a newer one. And so it is!
And you're right again in saying that multibooting is a lot of fun (well, most of the time!) but after a while you just lose interest because you just did about everything and you're not going to use all those systems on a regular basis. It was just to prove a point,and having done that,well...That's it then.
Hope everything is well with your family even with a C!!!

I had an old Dell laptop, I think about 5 years old, which has failed many times. A year or two ago it failed the video. When you boot it up, it flashes the Dell symbol, then blanks out. If you play with the boot message, which is invisible, once it boots up it does activate the external monitor function, and you can see it on an external monitor.

Later, that started working. One day, it totally died. No sign of life. I took it back to the Staters, and my SIL found out it had another bad keyboard. he got a cheap Chinese keyboard. I brought it back to Mexico in October. Worked fine, until I updated Kubuntu 12.04 at which time it failed part way through update.

I had two parallel installations +XP so I simply booted on the other one. Two days ago the video failure came back Sigh!

It actually acts like an intermittent connection somewhere, to be honest with you, based on working as a senior technician for years as part of a 31 year career.

I may try it with an externel monitor again, and play until I find out how far down the Grub message is for the good partition.

I had hoped to install Kubuntu 14.04 over the bad partition, but with no video until it boots completely into the distro, that is not practical. I may install 14.04 on another partition on this HP that so far hasn't blinked. There are advantages of parallel installations, especially when someting breaks. You can slip into the bad distro and take out any data you want. Of course you also can with a live CD.

I seem to have much better luck with desktop machines. I bought an emachine in 2005 and it worked okay until around 2 years ago. I had a lot of distros on that thing over the years. I think I had 4 or 5 laptops during that time.

I have a new HP desktop, alas with Windows 8, and have not managed to get it to boot a CD or DVD yet. I am keeping Windows 8 on it, because the MS Windows store has given me, free, harry Potter; Hunger Games; The vampire series and more. Not that I would pay a cent for them, but free, well, I am an inveterate reader. I have on my Linux machines around 1500 books from the Guttenberg Project, and can get more. But, this way I know what people are talking about with the book sI am getting.

When I am bored with the Store, i will then ignore the horrid warnings and see if that HP can be made to work on Linux. I guess the boot killer is in BIOS so that may be a problem that can't be solved with a new HD.

I would never mess with Win8, I think my old machine won't take it and besides a lot of my software would't go with Win8.
But we have some similar problems I would say, especially the Gutenberg project. I also downloaded a lot of them.
As far as booting goes,I remember installing Solaris on my Desktop and it is really tricky,because first of all it needs to be in a primary partition,like Win (yes,well) and then I had to change the boot order,because it wanted to boot without a SATA driver (which surprisingy it didn't have) and doing that WinXP protested that without it it couldn't boot anymore but I went along anyway and it works. Now for Linux it doesn't make any difference wether that SATA driver is on or not, they just boot. And in order to start WIN again I had to give it his SATA driver again in the BIOS.
Now for me,I regret I deleted my Ubuntu 10.10 because it worked perfectly,while 14.10 gives me a lot of problems, so I am really thinking about installing it again,just in a small root partition to see what it can do that the so much better 14.10 apparently can't!

Very old posting, but when I read it, I decided to give an update on my failed video. My son-in-law learned if I simply keep re-booting, eventually the video would start up. I tried everything and no fix.

I chose to put in Kubuntu on sda7. When I did, it moved the boot information from sda5 to sda7, and the video now works perfectly. My best theory is that sda5 had a marginal read cluster so it did not turn on the video per boot instructions. And, when I put in a new boot on another partition, it works fine.

So, all the time, the problem was a HD problem. When I hit the US again, I may get a new HD. My belief is when you have one bad cluster on a HD, all are risky. May not be true, but that is what I believe.

I think you're right about that. One bad cluster on your HD and you have a big problem. I experienced it myself a few years ago. I had a quite good backup luckily so I bought a new HD and it was ok. A lot of reinstalling to do of course...

I will put the new HD in an external case, and do a dd from the other partitions so I even keep my original Windows installation. Since I had a parallel installation in sda7, I was able to retrieve everything important from sda5. It is a lot of work as you say.

I cannot remember after this many years (since 1999) but I believe I learned about keeping Windows installation with dd, right here on this forum, but long, long ago.