Are you using grub legacy instead of grub2? ie. is the file menu.lst instead
of grub.cfg

Note: Grub2 lists the first partition as 1 and not zero as in grub legacy.
Devices are unchanged.

My grub from MEPIS entry (the only grub legacy distro I have installed)
looks like this:

title Windows XP Media Center Edition at sda1
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1