[TriLUG] Grub help?

[Neil L. Little]

I can from "hard won" exerience from my recent dual-boot "hell", tell 
you that using "grub-install" made the process easier.

Because I was using an NTFS format on my "winders" hard drive (hda) I 
was having trouble getting my system to dual-boot
and had to go about it in a different manner. The NTFS file system 
prevented me from writting the grub boot loader to that drive from my 
FC4 drive (hdb).
After much hair pulling and searching, I finally found the solution in 
the O'Reilly "PC Hacks book"
(Hack #94:  http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/2337 ).
I booted to my Linux drive by changing the boot order in BIOS. After 
getting my menu.lst (grub.conf) configured I ran "grub-install".
I wrote the grub boot loader sitting on the boot partition (hdb) to a 
floppy using the "dd" command and called it "grub.bin".
   dd if=hdb1 of=/media/floppy1/grub.bin bs=512 count=1
I changed my boot order in BIOS again and booted into "winders".
Then moved that file into the root "winders" directory. All I had to do 
after that was modify the boot.ini

    [boot loader]
    timeout=30
    default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
    [operating systems]
    multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP 
Home Edition" /fastdetect
    c:\grub.bin="Fedora Core 4 Linux"

Every thing is now happy. I can now move forward to one day eliminating 
that NASTY "winders" stuff on my first hard drive.

Neil Little, WA4AZL       JARS Forever!!   ... er TRULUG too!

====================================================
 >>>Um, you're thinking of Lilo. You don't have to run grub for the
 >>>changes to take effect.
 >>>  
 >>>

 >Um, that being said, it does not hurt to re-run grub to
 >make sure that the proper bootloader installed on the MBR.
 >
 >This might be necessary if you recently changed partitions
 >around, or perhaps if you installed a new O/S on *any* of
 >your partitions (the install process might have written over
 >the MBR).  I believe the original post said that he recently
 >installed FC5.
 >
 >I think the command you want is "grub-install" and not
 >simply "grub".  "grub-install" reads the menu.lst file and
 >writes the stage1 loader to the MBR.  "grub" simply pops
 >up a grub command prompt and waits for you to enter the
 >arcane grub commands.
 >
 >
 >Alan