I have installed Sarge from NetInst. On reboot Grub gives error-18 and stops. This is supposed to be solved by creating a boot partition within the first 1023 cylinders of the hard-drive.

I've tried creating a 50MB bootable partition during the install, but Debian won't install the kernal there. How do I get NetInst to load the kernal in the boot partition?

The next partition is mounted at /home and is 14.4Gb, after that is the swap area.

Menu.lst has:

default 0
timeout 5
color cyan/blue white/blue

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.4.27-1-386
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.27-1-386 root=/dev/hda2 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.4.27-1-386
savedefault
boot

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.4.27-1-386 (recovery mode)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.27-1-386 root=/dev/hda2 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.4.27-1-386
savedefault
boot

How do I get Grub to run?

I don't know the sarge installer specifically, but you should tell it that you want that partition mounted as "/boot". Does it not let you do this for some reason?

/boot does not even need to be that big. On my first install, I used a little bigger than that, not knowing how much I was going to need. My boot partition today holds only 7.5 MB today. You aren't likely to need much more than that (of course, give yourself a little room to breath).

Also, I'd have a knoppix disk handy. It is a debian system that runs purely from a CD. You don't even need to have a hard drive in the system to run knoppix. It can be useful as an emergency boot disk. (times like these for instance)

If you can get to a console, you could try manually copying the contents of /boot into the other partition, and running the grub installation program.

Any way, I'm tired and am going to bed.

1. Partition manually, remember you only have 4 primary partitions in a hd.

2.If you have to create a /boot (why is that?) with 15 MB is enough, and it has to be Ext2, otherwise, it won't work, the other partitions can be something else, (reiser, xfs, jfs, ext3, etc)

macondo: You can correct me if I'm wrong, but there are no real differences in this context between ext2 and ext3. An ext3 partition is formated with the command "mkfs.e2fs -j /dev/partition". If I remember right, you can even mount an ext3 as an ext2 (at least in read only mode).

You are right though that other filesystems can be difficult on grub. I think that stage 1.5 has something to do with this...

Anyway, I think that ext3 should work. Ext2 does.