I must be doing something wrong. I booted from the live cd and worked thru "install" to "partition", checked "manual" partition, got to desktop, opened terminal, entered "grub-install /dev/hda" and got "cannot create directory /boot/grub :permission denied".

Do you have any further thoughts/advice please.

Eric

Anyway in addition to Paul's suggestion I think the reason the original grub-install plan didn't work is that if you are running grub-install from a drive other than the intended boot drive (i.e. you have booted from a live cd and are running grub-install from there) then I think you have to give the intended boot drive as an argument.

So in your case

grub-install /dev/hda

There is no need to specify the partition number here, as grub should then scan the whole drive for bootable partitions and rebuild/reinstall grub for you. This is still assuming that you only have one physical hard drive in your machine.