[Gllug] installing grub on the Mbr

[Matthew King]

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

-- 
I must take issue with the term "a mere child," for it has been my
invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely
preferable to that of a mere adult.
                                           --  Fran Lebowitz

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