[TriLUG] grub and lilo problem

[William Villalba]

Dear all,

I've been trying for the last 4 days to install linux on my  system , 
but I am doing something that is preventing grub or lilo to be installed 
in the mbr. This is the situation: I have two hard drives, a 160 gb and 
a 80 gb. I used to have the 80 gb for data and the 160 gb for the 
operating systems--windows xp, gentoo, and suse. I decided to swap the 
160 for data and the 80 for installing operating systems. I  did the 
usual:  installed windows then went ahead to install linux. Originally I 
planned to install SuSe 9.1--a network install, and after finishing, 
everything seemed to be okay, but grub did not work. I tried to fix grub 
by using the "rescue" option, invoking "grub", root (hd0,x), and setup 
(hd0), but didn't work. I tried then to install Mandrake, RedHat, 
Debian...with the same result. Of course, I checked the bios and changed 
some settings--from "Enhance" to "legacy", from "auto" to "user", and 
played around with different possibilities. No luck!
Does anyone know what could be the problem? I thought that this was a 
kernel 2.6 issue, but I guess not because I have tried installations 
with kernel 2.4, but does not work either.  My system  is a Pentium 4, 
with a Intel motherboard, a  80gb Maxtor drive and a Seagate 160 
drive--both ide. A while ago I had a similar problem and how I solved it 
was by installing Linux first, then Windows and later using a knoppix  
cd to restore grub. However, I am not too sure this is the ideal 
solution, not to mention that this one have my head spinning...and I 
can't solve it. Any help I will greatly appreciate it.

william