[oclug] Help me make my Ubuntu bootable?

[Andy Civil]

I have a computer that I previously installed Ubuntu on. I have swapped 
out the old 30Gb drive for a brand new 80Gb drive, and that's the one 
I'm having trouble with.

Although everything seems to go smoothly, when it gets to the point of 
rebooting from the drive, it fails with an error "insert system disk and 
  press any key to continue" - or words to that effect.

One significant difference between the install that worked and the one 
that didn't, is that on the 30Gb drive, I partitioned for Windoze AND 
Ubuntu, so grub was loaded for me. But I was so happy with Ubuntu/wine 
that I dedicated the entire 80Gb drive for it (no windoze at all).

I initially made a mistake by choosing manual partitioning, and forgot 
to label /dev/hda1 (ext3) as bootable. Thinking this was my mistake, but 
finding that adding the tag didn't help, I re-ran the install and let it 
partition for itself. I believe this erased my mistake. Certainly, the 
partitions are resized, and /dev/hda1 is bootable now.

When I boot from the CD, in the file browser, it shows the ~80Gb 
partition, but if I choose to mount it, it gives an error "device 
/dev/hda1 is not removable" and "could not execute pmount".

When I boot from the CD, I can use cfdisk and see the partitions:
hda1   Boot  Primary Linux ext3           79258.80
hda5         Logical Linux swap /Solaris    764.96
I don't know why swap ended up as a logical partition ??? I certainly 
didn't choose it that way.

When I boot from the CD, I can create a directory /mnt/80gig and mount 
it with
sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/80gig
and when I do that, I can browse to the filesystem and see all the files 
in there.

It occurs to me that I could "cheat" and use the existing working drive 
(I still have it) and copy the working partition to the new disk, and 
then extend it to occupy the whole disk... but that wouldn't help me 
understand what I did, for next time!

I tried running
sudo grub-install /dev/hda1
but it crapped out with an error "could not find device for /boot: not 
found, or not a block device"

Help!!!