[Gllug] grub and dual booting with windoze xp

[Peter Cameron]

I recently took delivery of a new Dell Dimension 8200 PC at work. The first 
drive contains windoze xp. I put in a second drive (primary slave) to put 
Suse 8.1 Professional on.

First of all I had to re-partition the windoze drive as it only came with 
the C partition. I used partition magic to do this and now have C and D 
partitions as NTFS. However, there is an unallocated partition of size 
approximately 31MB before the C and D partitions.

I installed Suse 8.1 on the second drive and had the GRUB bootloader written 
to the MBR of the windows drive.

My drive setup as shown by mount is:

/dev/hdb1 on / type reiserfs (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0620,gid=5)
/dev/hdb2 on /boot type ext2 (rw)
/dev/hdb4 on /home type reiserfs (rw)
shmfs on /dev/shm type shm (rw)
usbdevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /windows/C type ntfs 
(ro,noexec,nosuid,nodev,gid=100,umask=0002,nls=iso8859-1)
/dev/hda5 on /windows/D type ntfs 
(ro,noexec,nosuid,nodev,gid=100,umask=0002,nls=iso8859-1)


I'm unable to boot with GRUB. I just get the "GRUB" prompt and the system 
hangs. Restoring the MBR with fixmbr gives me windoze xp back, and booting 
linux from the installation CD gets me that back.

My menu.lst file is shown below. Note that with the gfxmenu line commented 
out, GRUB gets past the prompt only to fail with either error 21 or 23 (I 
can't remember which, but 23 is probably right).

I've tried various methods such as installing the bootloader on the root 
partition, copying it to a floppy with dd, putting it on the C partition 
and editing boot.ini appropriately. This still gives me the "GRUB" prompt 
and a hanging system.

What have I missed? /boot isn't the first partition on the linux drive, and 
C isn't the first partition on the windoze drive. Is there a 1024 cylinder
limit as there is with LILO? From what I've read GRUB can cope with NTFS.

My menu.lst file:


# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Wed Nov  6 17:57:15 2002


#gfxmenu (hd1,1)/message
color white/blue black/light-gray
default 0
timeout 8

title windows
    root (hd0,0)
    makeactive
    chainloader +1

title linux
    kernel (hd1,1)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb1  hdc=ide-scsi  vga=791
    initrd (hd1,1)/initrd

title floppy
    root (fd0)
    chainloader +1

title failsafe
    kernel (hd1,1)/vmlinuz.shipped root=/dev/hdb1 ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off 
vga=normal nosmp maxcpus=0 disableapic 3
    initrd (hd1,1)/initrd.shipped


The device.map file is:

(fd0)   /dev/fd0
(hd0)   /dev/hda
(hd1)   /dev/hdb


Cheers,
Peter


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