Help with GRUB most urgently needed.

(Warning: not only geeky, but geeky in a horribly Linux way. I'm extremely happy with Ubuntu as long as I can forget there's Linux at the bottom of it, and it just reminded me.)

I managed to cleverly trash GRUB by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst directly by hand to boot Windows 2000 from /dev/hda5. Bad move — on reboot, stage 2 came back with the infamous Error 17 (can't see a file system).

I went in with the Ubuntu Live CD and mounted /dev/hda1 to /mnt just fine — so the file system is there. Couldn't work out from the docs how to get it to rewrite the bootstrap so it would start up properly.

Eventually I thought, "OK, it should be possible to get it to boot into the Windows partition if I reinstall the NT boot." Put in the Windows 2000 CD, went to recovery console, did fixmbr, rebooted, it didn't work, did fixboot, rebooted, it didn't work. You will note that by this stage I was trying things more or less at random.

I could "fix" it easily enough by reinstalling from scratch (and this time getting the dual-boot right) — I'd only lose a day's effort — but I'd rather get myself out of this one if at all possible. What have I trashed, is it recoverable and how do I get back to a booting system? For bonus points: how do I get it to recognise the Windows 2000 partition as bootable? You will earn so many *pint*s for supplying the winning answer, or even approximations.

Update: Solved! The partition type was wrong. *pint* to dennyd.