"The big Grub floppy you have in mind can be made by updating Fedora's /boot/grub/menu.lst and type these two lines at a Grub prompt
Code:
root (hd1,0)
setup (fd0)
If you want the Fedora Grub to take over the MBR of the (hd1) or (hd0) just alter (fd0) above with (hd1) or (hd0)." Installing the Fedora Anaconda's Legacy Grub is what caused the initial problems of hiding the first
XP drive where fdisk /mbr, Fixboot, and Fixmbr commands failed to restore the boot sector. At that time the
only way Core 4 would even load was to hide both XP and 98 partitions in order to make the Fedora active and
subsequently load Core 4. It was Western Digital's LifeGuard utility that finally restored the boot sector on
the XP master. It then took three attempts at reinstalling XP to get it to boot normal again. The install to
repair and second that deleted the Windows directory left two options at bootup. "Default=Windows" locked up
the system along with the "C:\Windows XP" option that had to be selected in a few seconds or the default will
lock everything up. An edit of the boot.ini file failed to correct that. Right before the third reinstall of
XP the Fixboot and Fixmbr finally worked where the third finally resolved that problem.
"Putting Grub into the MBR of (hd1) or (hd0) is against your initial wish. I am just showing the syntax here. So do it only after you have satisfied yourself that is the way forward. You now probably have more confidence as you can boot any of your systems up by the Grub floppy, even if you are not aware of both XP and Win98 MBR can be restored with just a Dos floppy with fdisk.exe inside."
Simply shows that you are still missing the point about installing anything into the XP drive's mbr not the 98SE mbr if needed. You are the one specifying the use of a bootable Grub floppy. So far the Grub boot disks
tried are unable to load the Fedora kernel. A FULL GRUB Loader would have to be installed to a floppy disk to
be able to load the Core 4 VMLinux kernel. That is also used on the Knoppix Live cd where creating a bootable
floppy was not possible due to not having the correct files for that. Memtest is there along with boot.cat in
the subffolders. But the Grub loader has to be installed to the 98 mbr to make a working boot floppy as seen
in Linux tutorials.
"Fedora Grub will never be operational unless it is put into the MBR of the first bootable disk."
With the XP drive disconnected the reinstall of the Legacy if no other loader would have to take it's place. The Legacy Grub would indefinitely hide the 98 partition as seen earlier when first loading Core 4.The fdisk
/mbr would then be used to restore the 98SE partition if successful. 98SE has to be reinstalled due to a reg error where 98 currently will not load. Plus having over 768mb of ram with the 2gb of memory installed won't allow a dos prompt to open as well as running other programs. There also won't be any sound available since
Linux detects the Audigy 4 Pro as an Audigy 2 model along with having no support for 98. Knoppix even failed
to initialize sound there due to the Audigy 4 and Audigy 4 Pro's 2K-XP only design. With no way to support 98
Fedora will probably end up as the single remaining OS on the second drive. XP can load old 8bit applications
using a utility called "Dosbox" ruling out 98 while leaving the first 2gb free for old dos apps. An alternate
bootable cd-r loader could resolve this quick if it could load Core 4 along with Windows since it would be a
large enough loader for the Fedora kernel. The Grub boot floppy was easily made with rawrite by following the
instructions at:
http://cstein.kings.cam.ac.uk/~chris/bootgrub.html The creator of the Grub boot floppy image
can be read about at:
http://cstein.kings.cam.ac.uk/~chris/index.html
The Anaconda installer can easily slam the Legacy Grub into the second drive's boot sector and booting with
an old 95 startup disk would allow even Windows 3.1 to run on the 2gb Fat16 primary without 98 even there. An
alternative was sought due to 98SE being able to use the usb dsl connection. Will Fedora be able to do same?
So far none of the Live distros have been able to connect as well as sinc time with any Linux server. You did
mention Core 5?
http://fedora.redhat.com/ is only up to Core 4 at this time. If you have a link for Core 5 it
would be appreciated here since that might offer a more flexible loader to use with 98.
(Gee? I still haven't bought a hard drive selector yet from:
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTk3 saikee.)