Seeking comments on what I did wrong.

Since my experiment with creating a GRUB boot floppy was successful, I decided to try installing GRUB on my Win98/Red Hat computer. What a mess. Here was the partition layout prior to the fiasco:

hda1 = FAT32 (C:\) [Win98]
hda2 = /home (ext3)
hdb1 = FAT32 (D:\)
hdb2 = / (ext3) [Red Hat 9]

After installing it, Linux would boot just fine, but Windows wouldn't. GRUB would display, "Loading Stage2..." and hang.

I tried very hard to restore from backup to hda1 without repartitioning the entire drive. I was unsuccessful. Using the "fdisk /mbr" command from a DOS boot disk did not erase GRUB from the MBR. Reformatting hda1 and then using "fdisk /mbr" did, but it hosed the partition table. Eventually I had to move the contents of hda2, /home, back to hdb2 and delete and recreate and reformat the partitions on hda, and set hda1 as the active partition.

(Thank God for networks and backups. "hdb" was unaffected.)

(The only difference between the boot floppy and booting into GRUB on the hard drive was that the boot floppy loaded "stage 2" before the GRUB GUI was displayed; from the hard drive, "stage 2" loaded - or not - after the GUI. I have no idea if that even makes a difference.)

Here's my /boot/grub/grub.conf file:

# Boot to Windows (the first entry) by default
default 0

# If for some reason that doesn't work, boot Linux
fallback 1

# Use the background image supplied by Red Hat in /boot/grub
splashimage (hd1,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

# Boot to Windows if no choice is made after 15 seconds
timeout 15

# Windows section
title Microsoft Windows 98SE
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

# Red Hat section
title Red Hat 9 (Shrike)
root (hd1,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-20.9 root=/dev/hdb2 ro vga=normal mem=128M hdc=ide-scsi
boot

you did mess up i guess,
try
it will work i hope