Boot up with a black screen and the word 'GRUB' followed by blinking cusor
 

Desired situation
----------------------
To dual boot Win2K and Debian, using Win2K's boot.ini as the first OS loader, i.e. Upon bootup, boot.ini will display a menu that allows you to choose to boot either Win2K or Debian. Choosing Debian will load the Grub GUI menu, that displays the various versions of Kernel, from which you can boot from (assuming you have more than one version of kernel installed).

My partition layout
------------------------
/dev/hdb1 /
/dev/hdb5 swap
/dev/hdb6 /home

What has been done
---------------------------
- Install GRUB using apt-get install grub
- Run grub
- At grub prompt: find /boot/grub/stage1, of which returns (hd1,0)
- do a 'root (hd1,0)'
- do a 'setup (hd1,0)'
- mount floppy to /mnt
- dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/mnt/sarge.lnx bs=512 count=1
- umount /mnt
- reboot and copy sarge.lnx into window's C:/
- edit Win2K's boot.ini to include c:\sarge.lnx="Debian"
- reboot

Problem: After choosing Debian from the boot menu displayed by
Win2K's boot.ini, I get a black screen with the word GRUB and a blinking cursor at the top left hand corner of the screen.

Any advice please?

Thanks !

you could use grub as boot loader and restore your old boot.ini

How do I use grub as boot loader and restore old boot.ini?

Thanks !

GRUB grubbing with my boot.ini
 

I too would be interested.

Been having a heck of a time trying to get Sarge installed via Beta4 netinst.

Install seems to go fine, but can never boot into it.

Like the original poster I have Win2K on /hda and Debian on /hdb.

Tried LILO on /dev/hdb1 and copied the boot sect. to a file. Selecting that option from NTLDR, flashes back to the Win2K menu option.

Tried LILO on /dev/hda1 (works like a charm with Slackware), gives me L 99 99 9 99 99 99 99 99 99 .....

Tried GRUB on floppy, boots to GRUB, in other words it just shows the word GRUB and a flashing cursor (then nothing).

Tried GRUB on /hda, boots to GRUB (then nothing), fdisk /MBR doesn't restore win booting ability. Have to undo the frigging that GRUB apparently does to my win2k boot.ini.

It's good to see that I'm not only one with this problem.

Yes i have the same problem, and I've tried to search for it on Google and other forums. Anyone with answers? Thanks in advance!

Start from scratch, remove --purge grub, apt-get clean then:

To install grub
as root:

apt-get update
apt-get install grub
grub-install /dev/hda
update-grub

all this is assuming you are using the same hard drive.

With your favorite editor, go to /etc/apt/sources.list and add this under your linux menu:

title Windows on /dev/hda1
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

hope this works...

Actually, you want to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, NOT your apt sources.

:D