[TriLUG] dual boot laptop loosing boot info

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

I've got a new (for me) laptop, a Thinkpad X60.

It's dual booting linux slackware 13.1/winxp with grub 0.92.

Every half dozen or so reboots, instead of getting the 
grub boot menu, grub comes up with

GRUB

and nothing else. AFAIK this is not one of the listed grub 
messages, so I don't know what this means. I can boot to 
linux off a cdrom or usb stick and when I'm in linux, I can 
run

grub-install /dev/sda

and the machine boots another couple of times before giving 
me the same problem. This was on a new hard disk that was OK 
with badblocks and smartctl. I replaced the disk and get the 
same problem.

I only boot to windows when someone needs windows help, 
which is about once a month or so.

When I check windows after having been through a few cycles 
of running grub-install, I find winxp won't boot from a 
functioning grub anymore. Whether it stopped booting the 
first grub failure, I don't know.

One time, wxp after chainloading, just did nothing (no disk 
activity, nothing), but I could still mount the files just 
fine with ntfs-3g

Another time, the NTFS file system was shot and couldn't be 
mounted (and it wouldn't boot either).

I assume the boot sector is being over written, but I can't
imagine what would be doing that. Once time the NTFS file 
system was trashed as well

I'm not getting any hardware problems (no freezes, hangs, no 
dirty ext3 filesystems on reboot), so it doesn't seem likely 
to be hardware.

I've got everything backed up, so I just dd the copy back on 
the disk and I'm going again, but this is a pain.

Any ideas where to look?

Thanks Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!