LinuxQuestions.org - LILO>GRUB and a little Drivecrypt thrown in...

Ok, so here's my dilemma.

I have a laptop with a 40GB HD. WinXP on the first 30gb. Then dual booted with Debian.

My drive is laid out as follows:

/dev/hda1 = NTFS - 29GB
/dev/hda2 = FAT32 - 1 GB
/dev/hda3 = ReiserFS - 9GB - this is my "/" and also my "/boot"
/dev/hda4 = LinuxSWAP - 1GB

I also use Securstar Drivecrypt for HD encryption on the NTFS partition.

Originally I installed Debian and used GRUB as my bootloader.

When you install Drivecrypt, and enable the boot authentication, it wraps the authentication portion around the existing MBR. So the first thing the MBR does is authenticate, then it goes on to whatever was there before.

With GRUB, when I installed Drivecrypt and kicked on the boot auth, it authenticates fine, then launches GRUB which hangs as it appears to try to load stage 1.5.

So, I went to LILO. When Drivecrypt wraps the LILO MBR up in it's boot auth, it works fine.

I'm not sure if this has something to do with GRUB STAGE1 being more sophisticated than LILO, or possibly just bigger. But it doesn't work.

The catch is after that, if I setup new kernels etc, and have to run LILO again, away goes my boot auth and my ability to get to my WinXP Partition.

So what I want to do is leave LILO there and have LILO point to GRUB on the first sector of the linux partition.

That way, I can tinker with new kernels etc without having to mess with my MBR.

From everything I've read and all the documentation, it should be as simple as running the following:

grub-install /dev/hda3
or
grub-install (hd0,2)
OR
at the grub prompt:
grub> root (hd0,2)
grub> setup (hd0,2)

Now all of these options have run fine... the problem is they all seem to overwrite my MBR and away goes LILO.

I'm not a Linux GURU by any stretch, so maybe I'm just making a stupid syntax mistake, or maybe what I'm trying to do just can't be done.

Any ideas would be great...

Joshua
CISSP, CEH, CCNP, MCSE, CCSA