Okay, saikee, now I'm in the need for holding my hand for a little while walking through this.

This morning I installed Xubuntu Feisty Fawn (first) and Windows 98 (second) on my mom's old laptop that still meets the Xubuntu minimal requirements.

This is my partition table:

Code:
/dev/hda1 FAT32   /windows
/dev/hda2 swap
/dev/hda3 reiserfs /
/dev/hda4 reiserfs /home
Now to the core of my problem:

The Xubuntu installer is stupid. The installation went more or less until the end when it said it can't copy GRUB to /target/ - with /target/ being the RAM-disk. Therefore I quit the installation since it was almost done anyway and planned to add GRUB manually later.

Then I installed Win98 to hda1 which went smoothly except that the old laptop now refuses to read any CD.

So there I went, created a GRUB bootdisk with your booting tips and did

Code:
root (hd0,2)
setup (hd0)
but got the answer that neither /boot/grub/stage1 exists nor /grub/stage1. Obviously Xubuntu has completely failed to even copy the package into hda3. So now I'd like to install GRUB into the MBR and have all the menu.lst etc. reside in hda3. How do I need to proceed?