Problems with dual boot and grub (Jim Cornette)

[Jim Cornette]

Kenneth Becker wrote:
>  (Jim Cornette) States:
> 
>> The BIOS goes to the mbr first and if it is not redirected by the mbr 
>> content, it goes to the only active partition that you mentioned.
>>
>> On this setup, grub is installed in the mbr. If the mbr was 
>> overwritten, it would boot into the partition marked active (XP in 
>> example)
>>
>> If I installed grub to /dev/hda2 and then made the partition active, 
>> grub will boot and be able to redirect the boot according to the 
>> grub.conf file. I could boot into grub without it being installed in 
>> the mbr.
>>
>>  
>>
> Yeah, that's exactly what I had done - install grub on /dev/hda2 (which 
> is the /boot directory) and rig it so it was the active partition. I've 
> got the problem solved, now, but what I was getting was "no operating 
> system" from the bios. After a bit of that I posted for help, here, and 
> got it - by having the comp load the XP boot.ini file, and from that, 
> loading c:\linux.bin, which has grub in it. Grub then loaded the correct 
> stuff from the grub.conf file in /boot/grub, and the comp started up 
> linux, as desired.
> 
> So: Why did I get that "no operating system"? It's not something with 
> the LBA, otherwise the linux.bin file wouldn't have worked!
> 
> Ken Becker
> 
> 
> 

In reality, I tried to boot from either hda1 or hdb1 for my systems. I 
haven't tried to boot from a primary partition hda2 or higher.

I did have a problem with getting xp to boot from a system where grub 
was installed in the mbr of the primary ide drive and /boot was 
installed on /hdb1. XP would not boot without adding makeactive in the 
chainloader command for the XP entry.

I'll mess around with combinations of installing grub in different 
primary partitions on one of my drives and see what happens with the "in 
theory", put into have tested for hda2 and higher drives.

Unless you have the above 1024 cylinder problem, I don't know why it 
didn't work as assumed.

Jim