I have tried to setup a multi boot system with FC6, XP and Vista, using GRUB as the bootloader.

FC6 and Vista are on one SATA drive, XP is on another SATA.

All appeared to be working well, GRUB would give me a menu to choose which OS to load, FC6 and Vista were fine, but my XP install was acting very strangely, with random lockups and certain programs not starting at all.

Don't ask me what thought process I had that made me do the following.

The XP part of grub.conf read;

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

So I decided to delete the makeactive line in the interactive grub editor, (talk about random stabs in the dark!)

This caused a "NTLDR is missing" error no matter which drive I booted from.

I decided to make a grub boot floppy and copy my menu.lst to it with the help of a Knoppix disk.

The upshot of this is I can boot what I want, but the GRUB screen is all garbled and very difficult to read.

What I want is

a) To have a readable GRUB screen with the boot floppy
b) To be able to boot my system without the boot floppy.

Any recommendations?