Problems with dual boot and grub

[Kenneth Becker]

OK: I've had a good installation, then a bad one, and I don't want to 
reinstall fedora all over again.

The system's a relatively recent Gateway 500S. It started off with a 50 
GB drive with Windows XP. I opened up 10 GB wth partition magic at the 
top of the hard drive. I then took a shot with (verified good) Fedora 1 
iso's.

Fedora, bless its heart, went ahead and installed itself. At the 
installation software's request, I hit the checkbox to put the grub boot 
stuff in /boot. After all the thrashing was over, booting the computer 
would give a selectable menu for "DOS" or fedora. Worked, too.

So, after getting all the updates, I saw this nice little bit about 
about enabling acpi with the "acpi=yes" parameter. This, apparently, 
needs to be put into the linux boot options.

Cool: so I spent the next half hour trying to figure just where those 
boot options were to go.  I _think_ I figured it out; one goes into 
grub.conf and puts it at the end of a line,
 kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2174.nptl ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi rhgb 
acpi=yes

I swear that's all I did. On the next reboot the computer came up with 
GRUB at the top left corner of screen accompanied with endless beeping. 
Oops. Hauled out the fedora boot disk, got into fedora just fine, 
corrected the file back to its original state - and _still_ had the 
endless beeping. Discovered after the edit that the permissions had gone 
to rw------- from rw-r--r--. Changed it back. No difference.

OK: So, now, I've been trying to reinstall things to the point where I 
have a useable computer.

Hauled out partition magic, made the first partition the active 
partition - got XP back. Well, that's good, I guess. No boot menu.

Booting wth the diskette, got back into fedora. Did the "grub-install 
'(hd0')". No more XP and I get a grub prompt. Nice, but no way to boot 
into linux or Windows, at least without typing all sorts of things that, 
at that point, I didn't know about. The XP rescue stuff rescued my MBR.

A careful checking of everything, plus the fact that I had to get the 
first partition active again, hints around at the idea that the BIOS 
boots into second partition, where it's caught by grub. Then, if so 
desired, one either boots into fedora or into "DOS" via the chainloader.

OK: so I do a 'grub-install --root-directory=/boot '(hd0,1)'. I then get 
into grub, do a "makeactive (hd0,1)". Shut down, reboot - and I get a 
message, "no operating system" and it all hangs.

Oh, well. Make the first partition the active one again and I have XP 
back. However, this is a stupid way to run a railroad. How does one get 
/boot to be bootable? There might be an example somewhere on the web, 
but I have no clue where after most of a day of searching.

This can't be rocket science. However, I'm stimied. How does one 
actually configure grub to do what it's supposed to do? Why in the 
blazes should a simple edit, even if it is misguided, blow away grub? 
FWIW, here's the grub.conf file, not that it's getting executed or anything:

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,1)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda3
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda2
default=2
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.4.22-1.2174.nptl)
        root (hd0,1)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2174.nptl ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi rhgb
        initrd /initrd-2.4.22-1.2174.nptl.img
title Fedora Core (2.4.22-1.2115.nptl)
        root (hd0,1)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi rhgb
        initrd /initrd-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl.img
title DOS
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

Any words of wisdom out there?

       Ken Becker