(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.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.
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.
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
