Hi
I had backed up my menu.lst to a seperate file. There seems to be no change in this.
When I select Win XP in Grub menu The following messages are displayed. partition type is fat chainloader+1
Stage 2
and after this I am back into Grub menu with 100 seconds(as specified in menu.lst) to boot ubuntu.
I can mount /dev/hda1(WinXP) on all the distros so there seems to be no problem with the hdd
Thanks Ninad