thanks mate! that was brilliant of u as i would get the exact boot stanza!
Back when, your choice was MBR, no install or floppy disk. If you chose no install there was no menu.lst created, so to get a menu.lst, without overwriting the MBR, a floppy was needed. When installing to the / partition became available, along with grub chainloading, it seemed the perfect item, even though I had no wish to chainload. Still that possibility exists, as well as the stanzas to copy to a master menu.lst. I kept the same master menu.lst, and grub install, on a boot partition, for four years without a hiccup.
If you like to try a lot of distros, you can have a chainloader stanza to each partition you install test installations to, then use it instead of copying the full stanzas to the master menu.lst. That way you only need to copy the stanzas for direct booting for the installations you decide to keep. I've done that when I wanted to test a lot of distros in quick succession. For a title I just used the partition designation.