[Gllug] installing grub on the Mbr

[john gennard]

On 15 Jan 2007, Matthew King wrote:-

john gennard <joney at clara.co.uk> writes:

 >> 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.


 >Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) has the package grub-disk which 
 >includes a floppy image with just grub on it. For some irritating 
 >reason this is gzipped so I tend to gunzip it somewhere useful (it 
 >can be a handy file to have around with qemu) but maybe this will 
 >work:

 >zcat /usr/share/grub-disk/grub-0.97-i486-pc.ext2fs.gz|dd if=- 
 >of=/dev/fd0

 >You can use this to get a grub prompt. Its menu.lst includes
 >stanzas for various OSs though you may need to change the devices 
 >they refer to.

 >It can also be used to install grub to the MBR. If your 
 >hda2:/boot/grub is complete you can try this at the grub prompt, 
 >there is a good chance this alone will make your system bootable:

 >root (hd0,1)
 >setup (hd0)

 >The stanza on the disk uses root (hd0,0), which is hda1 not hda2.

 >Matthew

Many thanks, I didn't know of this package - I'll try using
it. Incidentally, what is the reason for 'if=-' in your example
above?

However, I think my problem may be elsewhere. I put Grub on
a floppy and got a Grub prompt. Asking to boot Hd0,0 or Hd0,1
(that's W2000 or Debian) puts me into the installed O/S. But,
Hd0,4 or Hd0,5 do nothing. So, it seems the installations
in extended partitions are not 'seen' by grub (I don't even
get any error message - just a freeze). I can't see anything in
the Bios settings to account for this (that may be my lack of 
understanding!). Is it due to a Mobo perculiarity? Alex Smith
and Chris Bell spoke of problems with Sata, but I don't have
such a disk.

Again, thanks,

Regards,

John.

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