Unable to Boot Knoppix after Installing

[mactroneng]

I tried dual-booting with Windows XP on a Dell Laptop... Knoppix won't boot, GRUB never comes up, etc... it always boots windows no matter how I try the dual boot... I've been looking all over the internet and I've found that there's two populars ways to get GRUB working:

1) Using grub-install from the command line, specifying where to install it, blah blah blah, you probaly are familier with it, if not search "install GRUB"

2) Using the grub command line program, again specifying where to install, blah blah blah

I've tried both of the above main methods I've found, along with some variations of them, with all types on install (recommended debian, beginner, like-the-liveDVD install; install to mbr and root with all) and nothing works.

Trouble is, I'm pretty sure that GRUB isn't install right to begin with, whatever I do it can't find what it needs to install on my Knoppix ext3 partition... it's almost like I need to manually install GRUB from the LiveDVD after install Knoppix.

Now here's what's super frustrating: the very first time I put Knoppix on here, IT WORKED PERFECTLY!!! And now I can't get anything to work... I took off Knoppix to play with other distro's, but have decided to go back cause I'm doing alot of programming in school and I've noticed that the Knoppix DVD has a good variety of tools to do this with (and has gcc already installed... stupid ubuntu not having either).

One other thing that you might handy to know: I got a GRUB error 15 a couple of times, but that stopped fairly early on (I'd say within the first 7 or so times of installing Knoppix)

Any help would be appreciated... I'm pretty sure I've installed Knoppix like 20 times in the past 3 or 4 days trying to make something work.

Thanks people.

[hal8000]

grub-install /dev/hda

would install grub into the mbr of your first IDE hard disk.
You can try this as root from the live knoppix cd.

If you have installed knoppix it may simply be that the contenst of menu.lst are borked so
from the live cd post the output of

fdisk -l

(this will list your partitions so we can see where knoppix is installed to)

after that you will need to mount that partition and manually edit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Regarding ubuntu
sudo apt-get install gcc

installs the gcc compiler and associated dependencies