[Autistic] problems with GRUB...error 17

[Naja Melan]

hi,

I am new to linux (oh no, not another one, oh yes...;), and i  ran into some
troubles. My configuration is as follows.

Have 2 internal hdd:

ide0 master 300gb data
ide0 slave 160gb Windows XP Pro x64

After trying the live cd of Kubuntu, and liking it, i wanted to install it
on a disk so i could boot it without the cd. I thought it would be nice to
put it on my portable hd (ext usb), so i could take it with me and boot
linux whereever i want..., which would amongst other things allow me to get
packages and support from within, as i don't have internet at home. So i set
of:

to make a long story short, my external disk ended up partitioned like:

first 75 GB with ext3 for /
next 5GB swap
last 80GB saved for ntfs partition...

At the last screen i saw a button advanced... and pressed it. it said
something like "Grub help goes here..." and a text field reading (hd0)
unfortunately none of the disks had ever been called hd0 in the wizard so
far, so i didn't really dare to change it, however thinking that would not
leave my portable disk bootable. It turned out that it didn't manage to boot
anyway. I cant remember exactly what happend, but none of my three discs
booted to kubuntu, so i did everything over changing the value to (sda) how
the wizard called my external hd. This gave a fatal error upon installing
grub, so i didn't bother testing it and then tried again with (hd2).

Now when booting from my external disk, i get a grub menu letting me select
three types of kubuntu and XP. XP boots, but with Kubuntu i get the
following error immeadiately after selecting any of the three and pressing
enter:
error 17 : cannot mount selected partition

Now i just wondered what to do. Someone
here<http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/debian-linux-help/54820-cant-boot-kubuntu-after-installation.html>managed
to solve it by changing
menu.lst. I thought I would like to try that solution, but i have a few
obstacles: I can only boot from the live disk, and from windows.

How do i get write access to this file?
How do I find this file?
How do I edit this file?
And as we are at it do you guys (and girls) think this might work or not, or
have better solutions?

thx very much in advance...

greets
naja
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