I first attemped to install ubuntu on my existing windows drive only to have it fail at the end with an error about dynamic disks. I had attempted to repartition 100g. When I restarted I got chkdsk because errors on the drive. It seems that it did repartition the drive though because I lost the 100g but there is no ext part that shows up for that drive in gparted.

I decided just to get another hard drive and setup ubuntu on that. It installs fine and boots to a boot menu and starts. When I shut the machine down and boot into windows it starts fine. Now when I shut down after windows thats it I loose the boot menu and have to use the live cd to get the machine to start. The only other thing I can do is hit shift and I get loading grub but then it just hangs at a command promt.

Im guessing this may have something to do with the first failed installation but I cant find that original install to delete, except for the missing space on the disk.

Which disk are you booting from? It seems that the old one has a borked master boot record, and for some weird reason (be it hibernation perhaps?) it tries to boot from there. Make sure that the BIOS boot setting is set to the new disk.

In general there is a lot that can go wrong in boot time, and the windows bootloader is an arrogant and secretive prick.
1. It installs on the system boot drive (which may not be what you think it is) and then redirect to the drive where windows is on. Then removing the disk without windows (which seems safe) kills the system
2. XP hibernation modifies something very early in the boot sequence, because after hibernating xp, the pc always wakes up again to xp without asking if you want to boot to any other system.
3. It ignores other OS's (are there any other OS's in the world apart from windows?)

A possible solution is to remove the windows drive, boot into ubuntu, reinstall grub, shutdown, connect the windows drive, boot into ubuntu, run update-grub.

Another possible solution is to download EasyBCD in windows and try to remove all boot flags and bootloaders from the windows drive (not ntldr of course - that is chainloaded by grub) and let grub do the work.

Are you installing it on a Windows Dynamic Disk? In that case, repartition the drive to standard gpt/mbr and retry installation.

my first attemp was to install it on a dynamic disk sfter it failled the disk is basically reported as full inside widows. I ran chkdsk on it comes back with no errors ..gparted just shows it as a single ntfs drive.

I installled another hard drive now ubuntu(11.10) is on it by itself. Grub comes up now ...had to reinstall ubuntu and now it wont boot into widows at all. Cant get win to recovery because I have no idea what I set as the admin password. Im copying my stuff off the windows drive now and putting it on a seperate drive. Im then going format and reinstall windows and try the easy bcd route.

So I was able to get a copy of a vista bootloader, easybcd doesnt work with xp, copied it into my c drive and now win xp starts. Ubuntu doesnt even start when using easy bcd and making a bootloader entry. It looks like grub is gone.

I can use the live cd to get access to the new drive and reinstall grub. The mobo lets me change the first disk checked by hitting f10 so I would prefer just to use that rather than have a boot menu come up each time. When ubuntu formatted the new hard drive it looks like it made 5 partitions 2 @112gig and 3 @ 2gig which partition would grub go on?

Edit: do I even need grub? Can I just make that hard drive bootable?

Did you consider installing each of your systems with just the hard drive attached that will hold the system.

Only drive A inserted to install windows.
Only drive B inserted to install ubuntu.

After the installation is done you will then be able to select the system you want to boot inside of your BIOS boot order selection.
The running OSs will later pick up the secondary drive as unreadable (in windows) or as NTFS formatted drive in Linux.
When, during update-grub, the os-prober runs its code, it will add the windows system to the grub boot menu with a relative path to your grub mbr. Then you might fix the boot order to always boot from the linux hard drive, because grub will run (chainload) your windows boot loader.

This is exactly what I wound up doing a clean install of ubuntu with just the "ubuntu" drive connected and use the mobo boot drive selector to change the first drive at start up.

Now I think understand what's happening. It has happened to me too but I don't remember how I solved it. It has something to do with extended partitions and update-grub unable to find one of the systems. I ended up booting up manually via grub command line (load initramfs, then kernel then boot) and then writing the grub configuration manually.

If you don't want to go into bios and change the boot order every time, you could also use grub to switch the sequence.

taken from http://www.novell.com/documentation/...l/ch07s04.html

7.4.1.3. Changing the Hard Disk Sequence

Some operating systems, such as Windows, can only start from the first hard disk. If you have such an operating system installed on a different hard disk, you can implement a logical change for the respective menu entry. However, this only works if the operating system accesses the hard disks by way of the BIOS when booting.

...
title windows
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader(hd1,0)+1
...

In this example, Windows is started from the second hard disk. For this purpose, the logical sequence of the hard disks is changed with map. This change does not affect the logic within the GRUB menu file. You still need to specify the second hard disk for chainloader.

My problem was that the auto installer was installing grub on the windows drive. When windows was shutting down it f'd up grub.

Installing ubuntu with just the linux drive connected, it installed grub on that drive instead of the windows drive. Now windows cant f with it. I set the bios to go to hd1(linux) instead of hd0(win) by default. As michaaa62 said grub picked up the windows install and added it. I then modified grub with the startup manager to change windows to the default os.