I booted into mandriva with my good stanza for it's kernel and reconfigured the boot loader with the installation going to /dev/sdb1 which is the /boot partition. With this configuration the following stanza worked: rootnoverify (hd1,0) makeactive chainloader +1 Thanks for all of the responses, I joined the grub dev list and posed this query, if they tell me how to pass control to another mbr I will report it here. -- John Registered Linux User 263680, get counted at http://counter.li.org
