Need help installing Grub2

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

I have the following situation:

I have a fresh brand new drive that I have partitioned (MBR style) using
the Gparted Live CD.  I have also used the Gparted Live CD to copy a
number of pre-existing partitions from other drives onto the new drive.
In particular, I have copied onto the new drive:

     1)  A Windows 7 recovery partition
     2)  A Windows 7 boot/system partition
     3)  A FreeBSD boot/system partition
     4)  A FreeBSD data partition

All space on the new drive is now occupied by the above partitions, except
for the first 1 MiB of the drive.

I have heard that Grub2 is a Good Thing[tm] and would like to install it
and use it as a (multi-)boot manager on the above drive.  What is the
simplest, fastest, and easiest way to accomplish this?

I am a total n00b with respect to Grub/Grub2, so detailed instructions
would be greatly appreciated.

Must I first find a whole 'nother drive, install some flavor of Linux on
that other drive, boot that other drive, and then use Linux to install
Grub2?


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  I did make some modest effort to research this question before posting,
and I even downloaded and burned the latest Ubuntu (desktop) onto a DVD,
booted that into "live" mode, and then tried:

        sudo grub-install /dev/sda

but I only got an error saying something about "/cow".

Having been raised in the city, and not on a farm, I have no idea what to
do with that.  Am I supposed to milk it? :-)

Well, at least I'm not the only one who has ever encountered this udderly
befuddling problem:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/254491/failed-to-get-canonical-path-of-cow