Major problems with GRUB - cannot boot anything!

[redandwhitestripes]

Hi everyone,
I'm having a nightmare and hoping someone can wake me up out of it:

I'll try to be as concise as possible. My CD drive has died, so I installed
Damn Small Linux via unetbootin. My PC cannot boot from USB and my floppy
drive is also dead. I thought DSL would add a grub entry to my existing list
but instead it wrote a brand new one to the MBR.

Now I cannot access my other distros! I tried to copy over my old list and
edit it into the new one but when I rebooted, GRUB told me "setup signature
not detected" and froze. The DSL entry still boots OK.

I tried to do a restore of the old grub list via the terminal but I got a
message "error parsing numbers" or something similar. I may have been doing
the wrong thing as I'm a total Linux newbie.

I tried to install unetbootin again in my DSL partition but I got a message
saying certain files were unavailable. It looked like some dependencies were
absent but I have no idea how to get them.

To summarize, I want my other distros back on the bootloader but I don't
know how to get them!
I could try to manually edit the grub list but since it refused my paste
from the old grub list, how would I know what to type?!

I do have a second computer and a LAN cable if that could help in any way.

As you can see I'm in a fix and any help would be very, very appreciated.

Here are the entries on my OLD bootloader:
# For booting SliTaz from : /dev/hda7
#
title SliTaz GNU/Linux (cooking) (Kernel vmlinuz-2.6.25.5-slitaz)
  root (hd0,6)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25.5-slitaz root=/dev/hda7

# End GRUB global section
# Linux bootable partition config begins
  title Boxpup
  root (hd0,1)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 ro vga=normal
# Linux bootable partition config ends

# LXDE Pup
  title LXDE Pup
  root (hd0,3)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda4 ro vga=normal
# Linux bootable partition config ends

# Linux bootable partition config begins
  title Vector Linux Lite
  root (hd0,7)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda8 ro vga=normal
# Linux bootable partition config ends

And this is for my NEW file:
# This sets the default entry to boot. 
# Remember that GRUB counts from 0, so 1 is the second entry.

default 0
   
# This sets the length of time in seconds that grub will wait for the user
to select an OS
# before it boots the default on. I reccommend at least 15 seconds.

timeout 15

# Enter the entry for DSL here. Something like this.

title DSL
kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda8 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm nodma
noscsi frugal 
# Linux bootable partition config begins
  title Linux (on /dev/hda2)
  root (hd0,1)
  kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda2 ro vga=normal
# Linux bootable partition config ends
# Linux bootable partition config begins
  title Linux (on /dev/sda4)
  root (hd0,3)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda4 ro vga=normal
title DSL fb800x600
kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda8 quiet vga=788 noacpi noapm nodma noscsi
frugal 

title DSL fb1024x768
kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda8 quiet vga=791 noacpi noapm nodma noscsi
frugal 

title DSL fb1280x1024
kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda8 quiet vga=794 noacpi noapm nodma noscsi
frugal 

#title DSL with toram, mydsl, restore, hostname, and passwords
#kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda8 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm noscsi
frugal dma toram mydsl=hda5 restore=hda5 host=DSL1 secure

#title DSL with XFree86
#kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda8 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm noscsi
frugal dma toram mydsl=hda5/xfree restore=hda6 host=DSL1 secure

#title DSL with mydsl, restore, persistentancy, hostname, and passwords
#kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda8 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm noscsi
frugal dma toram mydsl=hda3 restore=hda3 home=hda3 opt=hda3 host=DSL1 secure

#title DSL Runlevel 2
#kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda8 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm noscsi
nodma frugal 2 base norestore

#title DSL Check filesystem(s)
#kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda8 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm noscsi
nodma frugal 2 toram legacy base norestore checkfs

#title Windows
#root (hd0,0)
#chainloader +1
#makeactive
#boot
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