it looks like you have solved your problem but just a friendly tip for any eventuality, you might want to check out a little know amazing software known as "grub super disk" or "super grub disk". it is a mini OS which you can burn onto a CD and use it to restore your grub in case it is not booting anymore. amazingly, you can also use it to restore your windows booting if you happen to have problem with the mbr or as a result of deleting linux partition and losing grub in d process. it is only about 3mb. i found it somewhere on softpedia. if you go to softpedia.com and do a search for it, you'll find it there. the only draw back is that it might be difficult to use at first but when you get the hang of it, it is an amazing software and i use it regularly to solve problems like the one you described here on people's computers.