[Gllug] installing grub on the Mbr

john gennard joney at clara.co.uk
Sat Jan 13 17:00:08 UTC 2007


I'm back again with another problem!

When I decided to leave the Abit NF7 mobo for a while,
I got an Asrock 775Dual-VSTA and an Intel 3.2 Gig processor.
I had a Maxtor 120 Gig IDE hard drive which I'd had for
some time but never used, so I decided to use that.

Firstly, I installed W2000 on hda1 (this I have on all boxes
as someone else likes to use it, and I find it useful
for printing). I had to take the installation up to Service
Pack4, and it would not accept the Asrock USB drivers nor
would the Internet Connection Wizard work, but otherwise
it was serviceable for the time being.

Nothing daunted, I installed my main distro Debian on a large
hda2, with hda3 as Swap. Grub I selected as Bootloader and
ask that it be put on the Mbr. Rebooting, to continue the
installation and configuration, I could not get beyond
'loading grub 1.5' and 'grub' (not a grub prompt!).

I'd had a similar problem once before, so I created hda5
and installed Ubuntu (Edgy Eft). Same problem, could not
boot W2000, Debian or Ubuntu.

Now, I had a go at Simply Mepis 6.0. Here I got some strange
results using parted to create Hda6 - the program was giving
incorrect details of the partitions on hda. Eventually,
I got this installed. Still grub on the Mbr would not boot.

Here, I wondered if the Bios (AMI) was at fault (having or
sending the wrong info, but I could find nothing which seemed
to me untoward.

Googling, I found a bug filed against a certain version of
grub, but the installations I was using had different
versions from each other.

I have no boot disks - some years ago I used them frequently
but now most installers don't seem to offer the opportunity
to create them. With W2000, I don't understand what the four
floppy set are intended to do.

Using Knoppix, I've found each Distro created a correct
/boot/grub/menu.lst.

I'm left to create a grub boot floppy - I've done it once
but I can't remember how and what I find googling also seems
confusing to me. I may be able to blunder through this but
I really want to boot all from the Mbr (all my other three
boxes boot from grub on the Mbr with W2000 + Debian + at
least one othe Debian based Distro).

Has anyone any suggestions which might help me please.

Regards,

John.


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