sounds like your trying to install grub2?

what error happened when you did grub-install?

grub1 its menu.lst
grub2 its grub.cfg

It's grub1...I went to http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...ion-under-UNIX and saw that the most recent grub1 is 0.97 which is what I have.

ok
so, did it install ok?

what exactly did you do and what happened?

being that you installed grub to fat32 partition
either reformat that ext2 and reinstall grub

or you might have to dd MBR of stick to remove grub from it...

aha-I got grub working from my ext3 partition. I removed grub on the stick with lilo in Slackware 12:

lilo -M /dev/sdf

Then I removed all the files on my fat32 and ext3 partitions that grub had made and reinstalled from my Fedora Core 12 box using this:

grub-install --root-directory=/media/ext3 /dev/sdf

I had already mounted both partitions.

Then I rebooted and saw a nice grub menu (needs a splash image, though). Unfortunately my usb stick only booted for a minute with the glowing XFCE mouse on the screen till it gave this:

/init: line 1: can't open /dev/sr0: no medium found

BusyBox V1.13.3

(initramfs) Unable to find a medium containing a live file system.

************************************************************************************************

My usb contains a fat32 system (it's blank) on hd0,0 and an ext3 system (this contains xubuntu) on hd0,1.

Here's my menu.1st file:

default 0
timeout 20

color red/black magenta/black

title Ubuntu-9.10 Live
root (hd0,1)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/xubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash --
initrd /casper/initrd.lz

title Ubuntu-9.10 Live Safe Graphics Mode
root (hd0,1)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/xubuntu.seed xforcevesa boot=casper quiet splash --
initrd /casper/initrd.lz

title Ubuntu-9.10 Live Persistent CD/USB
root (hd0,1)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/xubuntu.seed boot=casper persistent quiet splash --
initrd /casper/initrd.lz


title Ubuntu-9.10 Install
root (hd0,1)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/xubuntu.seed only-ubiquity boot=casper quiet splash --
initrd /casper/initrd.lz


title Ubuntu-9.10 Command Line
root (hd0,1)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/xubuntu.seed textonly boot=casper quiet splash --
initrd /casper/initrd.lz

**************************************************************************

Is something wrong with my menu.1st now?

I never had success puttin it on 2nd partition...

thats why I said setup 1st partition with grub (hd0,0)

try adding the UUID # of usb to kernel append line

root=UUID=?

with usb mounted do "blkid" as root
that will tell you uuid of usb

I just tried another usb with the same files but I repartitioned it so that it had 2 parts with ext3 first then fat32. I changed menu.1st to hd0,0 but got the same result...it booted for a minute with the XFCE mouse on the screen and stopped when it couldn't find /dev/sr0 (my cdrom).

How did you get the live ubuntu files onto your ext3 partition...the ubuntu usb-creator to fat32 and then you copied them to your ext3 partition?

EDIT:

I also just tried it on a usb flash partitioned with ext2 (first) and fat16 with the same results.

Figured out what was making grub hang and not get menu.1st...it was looking for grub.conf which I sym linked from menu.1st the way grub installs itself on your hard drive.